Q V 1 



^EEK 



TlOmf RDM LIFE 



IS. K/fARTIN 







1 




*'! 


, , •ii}n|i}tiUli<!ilf;ii 


1 ..v,>,:,i. 


lili 


SiH^Bi 


1, 


fk 






4iiniiii 


fKfjmfTTTTriffr ■' 




Class _JL5V 

Book ^_ 

GoipgtitN?. 



COPyRIGICr DEPOSIT. 



The War 

Week by Week 



As Seen from 
New York 

Being Observations from 
Life 

By 
Edward S- Martin 



New York 
£♦ P, Dutton & Company- 
Publishers 






Copyright, 19 14 
By LIFE PUBLISHING COMPANY 

Copyright, 1914 
By E. p. DUTTON & COMPANY 



Ubc Iftnfcfeerbocfter preaa, "Wew ]3orfe 

NOV 30 1914 

©CI.A387759 



INTRODUCTION 

THE war in Europe caught 
the general American mind 
quite unprepared. Very 
few of us had given more than 
passing attention to the Euro- 
pean situation. Most of us who 
thought about it at all, considered 
that though the factors that im- 
periled peace were obstinate and 
awkward, the cost of a great war 
and the disturbance attending it 
would be so enormous as to be 
prohibitive. So we had formed 
a habit of not taking first-class 
European war-clouds seriously. 



iv INTRODUCTION 

The second-class clouds, we had 
noticed, did sometimes result in 
war, but the big ones had to be 
blown away; they threatened too 
much. When the trouble over 
Servia and the murdered arch- 
duke came along we were merely 
interested to see how Europe 
would get out of it. That she 
would in some way escape serious 
consequences we did not doubt. 
We had often before watched the 
European diplomatists side-step, 
and we expected to see them do it 
again. 

They would have done it, who 
can doubt, if time had been given 
them, but as it was, the incredible 
happened. These following pages 
are a record in their way of how the 



INTRODUCTION v 

succeeding events affected Ameri- 
can sensibilities. No one, of 
course, can assume to speak the 
sentiments of the people of the 
United States, but a very large 
majority of our people seem to 
have been affected alike by the 
events that passed before them 
and the news and the arguments 
that they read, and their conclu- 
sions and resulting opinions are 
probably reflected with fair accur- 
acy in the pages that come after. 
Only citizens of German birth or 
descent and a few others have 
been able to accept the German 
point of view and approve the 
German proceedings. The rest of 
us — apparently four-fifths of the 
population — have seemed to see 



vi INTRODUCTION 

things about alike, and to place 
our sympathies almost entirely 
with the Allies. 

This American attitude appears 
to have been a surprise, as well as 
matter for concern, to the Ger- 
mans, who seem to have expected 
that to us as neutrals, their cause 
would look good. There are de- 
tails of their position that have 
a claim on neutral sympathy, and 
in the end may get it, but from 
the start these details have been 
crowded out of consideration by 
the alarming facts of the proceed- 
ings before us, and the still more 
alarming narrations and hypotheses 
put forward to account for them. 
We disapproved Germany's im- 
mense preparedness for war. We 



INTRODUCTION vii 

saw in her and no one else the 
author and compeller of the crush- 
ing armament of Europe. From 
Bernhardi we learned of a theory 
and practice of war, which, unim- 
portant when read as an academic 
dissertation, towered up into the 
proportions of a revelation when all 
the actual motions of the German 
machinery began to verify Bern- 
hardi's forecast. We read Usher 
and took notice of Pan-Germanism ; 
we considered the effect of Niet- 
zsche and Treitschke on the Ger- 
man moral sense, and all the time, 
while we were gathering what ideas 
we could about the contents of the 
contemporary German brain, we 
had in daily view the tremendous 
drive of the German Army over 



viii INTRODUCTION 

the line into neutral Belgium, and 
presently on and on, in spite of 
defenders, through the North of 
France to the gates of Paris. 

With that great spectacle of 
invasion, especially of little Bel- 
gium, before our eyes, no use to 
tell us that the Germans were 
banded together to defend their 
fatherland. For us there was no 
sign in these proceedings of defense 
of the fatherland. It all looked 
like a well-planned raid on Europe, 
designed to capture from anyone 
who had it, anything on land or 
sea which the German imagina- 
tion had come to find necessary 
to realize the huge German ideal. 

We paid little attention to 
Russia. Russia is a country we 



INTRODUCTION ix 

Americans read about. But Bel- 
gium and France we know. Penn- 
sylvania people know them far 
better than they know California, 
and Californians know them far 
better than they know Pennsyl- 
vania. They are as familiar as 
Massachusetts, and even more 
edifying. It was impossible to 
feel like chilly neutrals about hav- 
ing them ravaged, f ought-over, 
burnt-over, mulcted and Ger- 
manized. We didn*t want it 
done, and the more we saw it done 
the more we didn't like it. 

We liked nothing the Germans 
were doing; nothing that they 
hoped to do. Every one of their 
plans, so far as we could get wind 
of them, aimed to make the world 



X INTRODUCTION 

look less attractive to us. They 
were destroying our friends, de- 
stroying our favorite playgrounds, 
destroying, as at Louvain and 
Rheims, objects invaluable to us 
in our humble aspirations to 
understand life. They were de- 
stroying in so far as they could the 
world and the people and the order 
that we knew and dealt with and 
considerably liked, and they of- 
fered us in the place of them 
^' Deutschland tiber allesT^ 

Perhaps we are ignorant, per- 
haps we are selfish, perhaps we are 
not real neutrals. But, again, per- 
haps we are not Yankees for no- 
thing. At any rate the swap that 
Germany proposed did not look 
good to us on the 4th of August, 



INTRODUCTION xi 

and it has not looked good to us 
since. We are ready to love the 
Germans whenever they become 
lovable again and we do admire 
them even now; we are ready 
to move up and make room for 
them if they don't crush in too 
unmannerly; we are ready to be 
sorry for them if necessary (as 
doubtless it will be and is) and 
to help them as we can when they 
resume sanity of life. But with 
their proceedings in Belgium and 
their purposes in France we are 
not pleased; no, not for a minute; 
and if no choice is given us but 
whether to see the Germans 
annihilate the French or the Rus- 
sians annihilate the Germans, 
while we don't like either show, of 



xii INTRODUCTION 

the two we prefer to have the 
management run the films that 
exhibit the activities of the Czar. 
As for the Germans and the 
EngHsh we feel, primarily, a good 
deal as we might feel if it were the 
Germans and the Americans. Here 
are two full-grown, able-bodied 
nations. If they have differences 
that must be fought out, let's form 
a ring, and maybe when theyVe 
lost some blood there will be better 
feeling between them. But there 
is more to it than that. England is 
the background of about half the 
population of these States. In the 
British Isles are the chief relics 
and reminders of our history up 
to three hundred years ago. We 
have a great concern, undoubtedly, 



INTRODUCTION xiii 

for the preservation of that back- 
ground. We do not wish to see 
it Germanized or devastated. We 
want it still to be there when we 
go to see it. 

And the English idea of govern- 
ment and of colonial administra- 
tion is vastly nearer our idea than 
the German method. We should 
by no means like it to have the 
branches of the widespreading 
British tree lopped off and grafted 
on to the Kaiser's ambitious 
empire. 

And to the English as backers 
of the Belgians and allies of the 
French against the devastating 
German giant, our hearts go 
out instinctively. Though, plainly 
enough, England stands in the 



xiv INTRODUCTION 

way of Germany's ambition and 
that gives Germany an under- 
standable grievance, the same is 
true of every sovereignty now 
existing on earth. We all stand 
in Germany's way in her pre- 
sent mood, and her apparent 
willingness and readiness to de- 
molish us all as soon as she gets 
around to it, and take what she 
wants of our belongings, does 
undeniably give us a fellow-feeling 
one for another, and an instinctive 
inclination to edge up fairly close 
to one another until Germany gets 
new light. 



CONTENTS 



Introduction . . . . 


iii 


Caught in a Trap 


I 


German Intelligence 


H 


How TO Manage a Continent 


^1 


How We Feel and Why . 


33 


Voices .... 


43 


The Dream of Domination 


50 


Will They Get to Paris? 


60 


Backing away from Paris 


71 


The Case of the Kaiser . 


. 79 


A Complaint from the Kaiser 


84 


The Pathos of the Germans 


• 93 


A Foundling . 


102 


The Unscrambling of Europe 


118 


Let Us Turn out Our Pockets 


129 



XV 



XVI 



CONTENTS 



German "Kultur" and the 
Prussian Idea 

Dr. Munsterberg's Appeal 

A Little More Armament for 
Uncle Sam! . 

Germany, the Doctor 

Thinking like a German 

Germany and Colonies 

The German Ideal . 



139 
150 

158 

171 
180 

195 
209 



The War 
Week by Week 



The War: 
Week by Week 



CAUGHT IN A TRAP 

IS it that armament is a trap and 
Europe is caught in it? What 
is the inwardness of these pro- 
ceedings which now, at this writ- 
ing, have for ten days been going 
day by day from bad to worse, and 
read so entirely unHke real life and 
so much like a forecast-story by 
H. G. Wells? 

Is it all happening — has it all 



2 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK 

happened — ^logically, because the 
causes and the means were there 
and the clock had struck? Or is 
it Germany's put-up job again, 
like the war of 1870? 

The extraordinary mix-up of it! 
A Slav-and-Teuton row in Austria, 
that within ten days brings every 
gun in Europe out of its rack, fills 
France and Germany with weeping 
women, sends German ships scurry- 
ing to port or holds them there, 
and closes every stock exchange 
in the world! The mere wash of 
this disturbance, look what it does 
to us ! Our stock exchanges closed 
for the first time since 1873, our 
values disordered, our blessed 
tourists by the thousand running 
hither and yon in Europe, their 



CAUGHT IN A TRAP 3 

credits useless and no ships to bring 
them home ! It is Hke being caught 
in a vast flood, an overwhelming 
torrent of hate and sudden death 
from Europe* s broken dam. We 
clutch at the newspapers falling 
from their presses in continuous 
showers. We can do little at the 
moment for our own caught in 
that huge welter of civilization 
running amuck, and nothing yet 
for all those other innocent vic- 
tims of — what? Victims of what? 
What has done it? With whom is 
the final reckoning to be made? 
It seems a war not brought on by 
peoples, but by three aristocratic 
governments; by the tottering 
Hapsburgs and their allied interests 
in Austria, by those governors of 



4 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK 

Russia that direct the irresponsible 
absolutism of which the Czar is 
the figurehead, and by William 
the Prussian and the Germany he 
stands for. It is no war of France, 
no war of England. Italy as yet 
holds off from it. It seems to spell 
Austria's desperation, Russia's re- 
sistance, and Germany's oppor- 
tunity. 

Well, it is the hundredth year 
from Waterloo, and we shall see 
what we shall see; signs and won- 
ders, who can doubt, and an upshot 
far beyond calculation. 

Out of all the sudden din of 
rumor, prediction, and mobiliza- 
tion which has proceeded from 
Europe, it has seemed apparent 



CA UGHT IN A TRAP 5 

that no great power over there 
wanted to fight except Austria, 
and she only about enough to 
chastise the Servians and save 
herself from impending disruption. 
Between no other countries was 
there immediate bitterness of 
spirit. The rest were prepared, 
but anxious and reluctant. 

So, arguing from reasons, it 
seemed as if our brethren must 
manage to localize the war. For 
England, France, and Russia to 
fight Austria, Italy, and Germany 
because the Austrian Serbs are 
unruly and the Archdiike Ferdi- 
nand was assassinated seemed too 
preposterous to happen. It is in- 
credible that it should happen. 
But wars spring out of conditions 



6 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK 

far deeper than the immediate 
causes. Germany is a great and 
ambitious miHtary power with im- 
portunate desires and an immense- 
ly expensive army. The condi- 
tion of Europe, sweating under an 
enormous armament, the Triple 
Alliance and the Triple Entente 
watching one another with weap- 
ons ready, was a condition of 
long-standing strain and very un- 
stable balance. Somehow, some- 
time, Europe has got to have 
relief from such expenditures for 
armament as she has been carry- 
ing; somehow, it would seem, 
there must come to be, vir- 
tually if not nominally, the United 
States of Europe, with a central 
authority strong enough to keep 



CAUGHT IN A TRAP 7 

order in the whole European 
family. 

As it is, with the Alliance and 
the Entente, Europe was organized 
for a huge civil war. Must that 
come, and vast destruction with it, 
before the members of the Euro- 
pean family can reach a larger 
understanding and submit to the 
regulation of the family council? 
Our States split, fought, and joined 
again; but, slavery gone, there 
was comparatively little to hinder 
their reunion. There is vastly 
more to keep the nations of Europe 
apart — repulsions of race and 
traditional hatreds without num- 
ber, and the family interests of 
rulers, titular and actual. Still, 
half a loaf is better than no bread, 



8 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK 

and a modified and regulated inde- 
pendence may seem preferable to 
destruction. 

Especially it may seem so after 
a great war. To fight, to suffer, 
if need be to die for something 
dearer than life and worth more, 
is one form of human satisfaction 
and the quarrel with it has no very 
tenable grounds. But to fight and 
suffer and die merely that the pro- 
cesses of civilization may hunch 
along by another jolt is pretty 
tedious, and the doubt if civiliza- 
tion is advanced by vast, wholesale 
wars makes it more so. The end of 
all wars is peace on a better basis, 
and the clearing away of obstacles 
to the development of the peoples 



CAUGHT IN A TRAP 9 

whose development shows the most 
promise. 

The last big war in Europe gave 
Germany an Emperor and France 
a President. The next may give 
Germany a President, and to Rus- 
sia commission government, and to 
Austria heaven knows what, for 
tradition, when the smoke clears 
away, may be found among the 
dead on the field. Nobody can 
guess what will come in the wake 
of such a war as now seems under 
way; nobody can say whether 
there will be a crowned head left in 
Europe. All anybody can safely 
assert is that a vast treasure will be 
consumed, and that tens of thou- 
sands of the best lives in Europe 
will go out. 



10 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK 

This enormous topic puts all 
ordinary topics deep in the shade. 
Watching Europe is the ruling oc- 
cupation in these States at this 
writing, and it is a pretty lively 
job, especially for thousands of 
people who have friends traveling 
abroad, and who want mightily 
to know what is happening to 
them and how they are to get 
home. 

Our government is taking 
thought actively about them, of 
course, but war is not polite, and 
does not always wait for non- 
combatants to get out of the way. 
Our friends in England we think 
of as safe. About our friends in 
France we shall think with more 
anxiety until we hear further. 



CAUGHT IN A TRAP ii 

There is a great food problem 
coming, and great money problems. 
So far the chief function of these 
States in relation to the threatened 
suicide of Europe has been to assist 
the intending decedent in turning 
his effects into cash. But if the 
threat is to be carried out there will 
be fiscal transactions to conduct 
that will call for the highest avail- 
able skill, and that has stirred again 
the demand for Mr. Warburg on 
the Federal Reserve Board and the 
prompt completion of that board 
so that it may proceed to business. 

If all Europe is to be one tre- 
mendous moving picture of war it 
will be hard for us to keep our 
minds sufficiently on things at 



12 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK 

home to do our necessary business 
here. School is keeping in Europe 
for all mankind while these ter- 
rific possibilities impend. We are 
prone to forget what sort men are; 
prone to think they have become 
different; have risen above the 
possibilities of such behaviors as 
they once committed. But who, 
besides Mr. Bryan, and perhaps 
Mr. Carnegie, can think yet of 
civilization withotit wars? Men 
fight more politely than they used 
to, and are less cruel in retaliation 
and revenge, but there is as much 
fight in them as ever, and when the 
preventives of war and the sacri- 
fices to avert war and preparations 
for war have finally got too irksome 
to be endured, at it they go, ham- 



CAUGHT IN A TRAP 13 

mer and tongs, and the best men 
win, presumably. At any rate, re- 
sults come in that way that do 
not come otherwise. 

If Europe must have an enor- 
mous revolutionary convulsion pre- 
ceding some new arrangement of 
her institutions and the relations 
of men, she will have it, and have 
it to a finish, and we who will look 
on must learn what we can and help 
as we may. 



GERMAN INTELLIGENCE 

ARE the Germans intelligent? 
Of course some of them are. 
Individuals of every pat- 
tern are intelligent. But the Ger- 
mans who have managed Germany 
for the last sixty years ; who believe, 
as Bismarck did, in blood and 
iron; who have made of Germany 
such a wonderful machine, have 
made her strong and rich and 
masterful, and are so intensely 
bent on securing for her all that 
may be coming to her — ^what of 
them? Are they intelligent now? 
Everybody seems to feel that 

14 



GERMAN INTELLIGENCE 15 

Germany might have stopped the 
war that Austria had started if she 
had really wanted to. Not on old 
Franz Josef, but on William the 
Prussian, is laid the responsibility 
for this war. The belief is that 
the management of Germany was 
ready for more of the great blood- 
and-iron tonic, and let the war 
come, and probably even en- 
couraged Austria to light the 
fuse. 

It looks so. 

''This time France must be 
finished so that she will make us no 
more trouble." That sentiment, 
frankly expressed by some of the 
German managers, is part of the 
formidable German motive, and' 
along with it goes imperial, world- 



I6 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK 

gobbling purposes that it needs 
a large map even to discuss. 

Was it intelligent of the German 
management to want to finish 
France ? Between individual 
Frenchmen and individual Ger- 
mans there is not much ill will. 
They can get on together perfectly 
if conditions are favorable. The 
chief trouble between France and 
Germany since '71 has been Alsace 
and Lorraine, captured by Bismarck 
and dragged away over the French 
border. France must be finished 
because Bismarck carried her be- 
loved provinces off to his politi- 
cal harem, and she will go after 
them the first good chance. 

But nobody but the German 
management wants France to be 



GERMAN INTELLIGENCE 17 

''finished/' England, Russia, It- 
aly, these States, all the rest of 
us, prefer France in the unfinished 
French state as heretofore. We 
want no German jailers in charge 
of her, no German flavors in 
her honorable dishes, no German 
admixture in her architecture. 
Wedo not want any made-in- 
Germany France. No, no, not 
any! 

It is not popular, this idea of 
' ' finishing ' ' France. France is too 
valuable to be "finished.'* For 
one thing, she is charming. For 
another, vshe is a laboratory of 
civilization where experiments are 
made in government, in religion 
and irreligion, in cooking, in art, 



1 8 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK 

in the regulation of the affections, 
in everything. Of course, to finish 
her is the idea not of the German 
people but of the German manage- 
ment. The German people would 
not gain a lap by finishing France. 
They probably prefer variety in the 
world, as the rest of us do, and like 
the picture better with France 
left French. But the German 
management is a different affair. 
It is no more a free agent than a 
locomotive engine. It has to run 
on the rails that have been laid 
down for it by Bismarck and the 
engineers before and since. It 
has got to hang onto Alsace and 
Lorraine, and get all it can where- 
ever it can get it, and stick to blood 
and iron, and load up with arma- 



GERMAN INTELLIGENCE 19 

ment, and plot to swallow Hol- 
land, and plot to swallow Denmark 
and Belgium, and plot a German 
pathway to the Mediterranean, 
and paint the map of the world the 
German color to the last possible 
peninsula and cape. The manage- 
ment is free only to acquire. It 
may not be merciful ; it may not be 
generous ; it may not even keep its 
word if its 'interest " conflicts with 
it. It may only be greedy and 
grab and rise up early to keep what 
it gets. 

It sounds like the story of the 
New Haven Railroad over again, 
doesn*t it? Can it be that the 
Kaiser is the Charles S. Mel- 
len of Germany? They say 



20 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK 

France has only one joke; certain- 
ly autocracy has only one story. 
Live and let live seems to be a 
necessary rule of life, but it is a 
rule that autocracies can never 
keep. Their interests will always 
conflict with the let-live end of it; 
their existence is too precarious to 
risk a competition of strong neigh- 
bors; they must be, and take 
thought always to keep on being, 
the great trusts that are so strong 
that nothing can touch them, and 
that are able at any time to swal- 
low anyone that is inconveniently 
active in the same business. It is 
the old story again that the chain 
that binds the slave binds the 
master. Autocrats are no more 
free than autocratized people. 



GERMAN INTELLIGENCE 21 

There is a "must" for Hapsburgs, 
a ''must" for Hohenzollems, and 
they must do it or quit. 

However, autocracy is a process. 
Some things are accomplished by it 
that could hardly come otherwise. 
Diaz was a process; Standard Oil 
has been a process; Mr. Morgan 
was a great process in some re- 
spects, and the German Empire 
could hardly have been organized 
in a mass-meeting. The empire 
was all right enough — a going 
concern of great efficiency and one 
of the leading assets of civilization. 
The German people are very valu- 
able folks ; nobody doubts it. But is 
their management up to the date? 
Is it intelligent with a current and 
contemporaneous intelligence, or is 



22 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK 

it driving along unadjusted to its 
generation? 

That seems to be the great 
question whereof these great war 
movies now proceeding may have 
the answer coming in their films. 
The Germans are intelligent. In 
spite of the large detachments of 
intelligence from that country for 
the benefit of this one that followed 
1848, there is plenty left. They 
are able and they are well trained. 
They will not like to tip out their 
board of directors and discharge 
their hereditary manager, the gen- 
ial and exemplary William Hohen- 
zoUern. He is a good man of 
the kind and liked and respected. 
But if he is out of date what can 



GERMAN INTELLIGENCE 23 

they do? If Germany is a mere 
Hohenzollern asset the creditors 
may get it, but if Hohenzollerns 
are a mere liability of Germany 
ithey can be discharged. 

That is where France has the 
best of it. She fired her hereditary 
manager along about 1793, and 
has never had one since for long at 
a time, and since 1871 committees 
of her stockholders have run her 
business, and done fairly well. 

Never was anything so inter- 
esting as this war. They say that 
England may run out of news 
paper. Appalling! Any live per- 
son hereabouts would rather give 
up food than newspapers. The 
Evening Sun declares that, regard 



24 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK 

being had to the means of trans- 
mitting the news, the week ending 
August 6th was "the most inter- 
esting seven days any generation 
of man has lived through. " Very 
likely; and the second act in the 
great drama may make the first 
act seem tame. 

We are getting the climax of 
materialism. One recalls reading 
lately with amusement mixed with 
sympathy the suggestion of Mr. 
R. A. Cram, reviver of the Gothic, 
that we are at the beginning of a 
new five-hundred-year period in 
which what we call "modern civili- 
zation, ** dating roughly from the 
fall of Constantinople in 1453, 
"will dissolve and disappear as 
completely as the Roman Empire 



GERMAN INTELLIGENCE 25 

vanished at the first node after the 
birth of Christ." And, then, Mr. 
Cram suggested, we will get back 
the best of what was in "the great 
Christian Middle Ages." 

This idea seemed interesting 
though fantastic, but nothing seems 
fantastic any more, and it is "a lead- 
ing banker" whom a newspaper 
quotes as saying, anent the collapse 
of the mechanism of exchange : 

''We have been building up this 
delicate fabric for hundreds of 
years and we thought that it was 
in perfect working order and was 
sufficient to stand up under any 
contingencies. But it has broken 
down in a night and the world 
plunged into a condition like that 
prevailing in the Middle Ages." 



26 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK 

The world may not be going 
all the way with Mr. Cram, but 
it has made quite a lurch in his 
direction. 



HOW TO MANAGE A CONTINENT 

IT is evident that the European 
method of running a continent 
is behind the times; so obvi- 
ously and fatally behind that it 
has come to terrible smash and in- 
volved everyone concerned in it in 
an incalculable disaster. The prin- 
ciple of this collapsed method has 
been every nation for itself with 
such help as it could attract, and 
the devil take Europe. There 
have always been combinations, 
but they have been temporary. 
There have been concerts of the 

powers and Ententes and Alliances 

27 



28 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK 

to preserve the balance of power, 
but nothing effective enough to 
permit any European nation to 
allow her powder to run low or 
miss the latest thing in guns and 
war material. 

Think what life in these States 
would be if they all had to arm and 
drill and carry guns against one 
another! Think of New York 
setting up to be boss of the family 
and maintaining a fleet in coalition 
with Connecticut and Rhode 
Island in rivalry with Massachu- 
setts and Maine! Think of the 
ambitions of Illinois to control 
the waterway to the Atlantic, and 
the anxiety of Missouri to keep 
clear the way to the Gulf! Think 
of Texas with separate interests, of 



MANAGING A CONTINENT 29 

California with still another set of 
needs and rivalries and an army 
and navy to back them! Think, 
for short, of hot water, and then of 
hotter water, and more of it, then 
of immense quantities of boiling 
water under pressure, and you will 
have an idea what this country 
woiild be if run on the European 
plan. 

Incidentally you will get a no- 
tion of what the American Civil 
War was fought to avoid, and of 
what the Monroe Doctrine was 
contrived to avert, and of the value 
to peace of the disposition that left 
Cuba her autonomy, that seeks 
now to open a path to independ- 
ence for the Philippines, and that 
has held off with scruples that 



30 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK 

have been so much criticized from 
every sign of land-hunger in 
Mexico. If a great, preponderant 
power is to keep the peace in a 
continent it must not be selfish and 
it must be trustworthy, and it 
must respect minority represen- 
tation. Moreover, it must not be 
too free with its neighbors* land- 
marks. Napoleon tried to rear- 
range the landmarks of Europe, 
and they were too much for him. 
Bismarck took Alsace and Lor- 
raine and Schleswig-H o 1 s t e i n ; 
Austria grabbed Bosnia and Herze- 
govina and abolished the Sanjak 
of Novibazar. Behold the fruits 
of those larcenies! Enterprising 
European autocrats and their 
boards of managers must be 



MANAGING A CONTINENT 31 

broken of their propensity to 
change the map and insist on blue 
or green peoples living in yellow or 
red districts. The European mind 
must learn the lesson that the 
American mind is born to — the 
lesson of a continental family 
made up of diverse individuals, 
actively competitive, but sub- 
missive to such limitations of in- 
dividual action as the integrity 
and prosperity of the family 
require. 

Autocracies, not peoples, have 
got Europe into its present fearful 
mess. Autocracies and their nar- 
row selfishness and their frightful 
blunders have fastened militarism 
on her and brought her to the 
brink of hell. She will come back, 



32 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK 

but how can they come back? 
Surely they are all riding to a fall 
— Hapsburgs, Hohenzollerns and 
Romanoffs — for though Russia's 
lot is cast in with the democratic 
governments and their success may 
seem to promise that her present 
government will stand, she cannot 
escape a salvation that has become 
epidemic in Europe. She will get 
her share. 



HOW WE FEEL AND WHY 

SOMETIMES the clouds 
come up and gather black 
and threaten torrents, and 
then the wind changes and they 
blow away without a drop. 

So also with war-clouds. They 
have so often blown away without 
a gun fired. But not this last 
time. This time there has come 
war; not a mere single war, but a 
sudden cloudburst of wars that 
fairly beggars expectation in its 
menace. 

At this writing that is still about 
all we know. We have had the 

3 33 



34 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK 

furious blast that precedes the 
storm and watched the scurrying 
of wayfarers for shelter. We have 
seen the lightning strike in a few 
places, but the great destructive 
energies have not shown their 
power yet. There have been 
some thousands killed, perhaps — 
the news as yet comes very weak in 
detail — a few vessels sunk or cap- 
tured; but, as we write in the 
second week of disturbance, the 
chief destruction has been to con- 
fidence and commerce. It is as 
though Europe was afire. And 
so she is, and no one putting out 
the blaze, but the available mili- 
tary population of six countries 
running to add to it, and more 
expected. 



HOW WE FEEL AND WHY 35 

What we know who write is that 
enormous levies of trained soldiers 
are on their way to great battles. 
We know the Belgians, to the 
wonder of onlookers, have checked 
the German advance through their 
borders, and nicked with an im- 
pressive and cheering gash the 
prestige of "invincible Germany." 
We know nothing worth mention- 
ing about the English and German 
fleets. We know that Europe is 
full of our friends and neighbors, 
caught in the great conflagration, 
and not able as yet to escape from 
it. But the edges of the picture 
are all as yet that we can see. The 
center is veiled still. No doubt 
our readers of this issue will have 
seen some of it. We think of them 



36 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK 

a good deal as one thinks of people 
who have had a look-in on the 
Judgment Day. 

The unanimity of sentiment in 
this country against Germany is 
surprising. It is not anti-German, 
and it is not pro-English. It seems 
to be a judgment given promptly 
and spontaneously on the merits of 
the case as seen by American eyes. 
As a people we have come in the 
last fifty years to be almost as near 
kin to the Germans as to the Eng- 
lish. We respect the German 
ability and value German friend- 
ship; nevertheless, the American 
mind records and discloses with 
hardly appreciable dissent the 
impression that the English, 



HOW WE FEEL AND WHY 37 

French, and Russians are fighting 
in this war in behalf of the liberties 
of all the world, and that Germany 
and Austria are seeking to impose 
on the world a despotic authority to 
which it would be ruinous to yield. 
For fifteen years in this country 
a steady fight has been going on 
against commercial despotism. It 
has been a hard fight, the harder 
because it has seemed to many to 
be a fight against efficiency. We 
think we have won it, and we hope 
that in the long run the result will 
prove not to be prejudicial to 
efficiency. But however it may 
turn out, this fight against powers 
that were, and seemed indomitable, 
has perceptibly trained and edu- 
cated the American mind. In 



38 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK 

many particulars we think differ- 
ently from what we thought fifteen 
years ago. What was radical 
opinion then is public opinion now. 
We have thrown off the yoke of the 
railroads and the trusts that had 
dominion over us. How we shall 
get along without the guidance 
they were used to give us we do not 
know, but we not only hope to get 
along without the harm to our- 
selves that would inevitably result 
from serious harm to them, but 
hope that in the end they will 
prosper better and be more service- 
able from having been put in their 
place. 

Germany, with her stout insist- 
ence on having her "place in the 



HOW WE FEEL AND WHY 39 

sun," no matter who must be 
crowded out of it, has seemed to 
Americans to personify the com- 
mercial despotism that they have 
fought long and finally beaten at 
home. Her word to Europe and 
all the world has been, "I shall 
have what I want, and I have the 
power to take it." With that 
spirit in control of her government 
and people she has forced arma- 
ment on armament on all her 
neighbors and compelled them to 
the conclusion that there would be 
no peace until it had been settled 
by arms whether Germany or the 
rest of Europe was the stronger. 
As to that, we shall know in due 
time, but the instant Europe wins, 
if she does win, it will be a case 



40 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK 

like our case of the railroads and 
the trusts. To destroy them 
would be only a shade less bad 
than to be ruled by them. Ger- 
many is a very important spoke 
in the wheel of civilization. The 
moment it has been drubbed into 
her that she is not the whole wheel 
it will be necessary to help her with 
such repairs that she can go on 
with her work. As much as these 
States are anti-German because 
Germany seems to need the illu- 
mination of defeat, so they will be 
pro-German just as soon as she 
has had her lesson. 

As for the Slav peril, which 
Professor Miinsterberg and Pro- 
fessor Richard make so much of, 
there are very few shivers running 



HOW WE FEEL AND WHY 41 

up American backs on account of 
that. The Slav peril is remote; 
the German peril was imminent, 
and Europe was justified in taking 
counsel from the copy-book and 
doing the next thing. 

A great war is a great paci- 
ficator of squabbles. This one in 
Europe has pitched the Ulster 
disturbance out of court and made 
the militants negligible. Nobody 
in England has time to bother 
with invented troubles and hos- 
tilities when real ones press so 
hard on British energies. It is a 
good deal so with our minor diffi- 
culties. There couldn't be a great 
railroad strike. It was no time for 
it. So the railroads agreed to 



42 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK 

unacceptable terms of arbitration. 
There was no time for any more 
fooling by hostile Senators over 
the Federal Reserve Board, so Mr. 
Warburg was confirmed and the 
Board completed by the appoint- 
ment and acceptance of Mr. De- 
lano. Mr. Warburg, by the way, is 
a German product, not very long 
out of Hamburg and only lately 
naturalized; and yet, though gen- 
eral sentiment is so strongly 
against the German Government 
in the war, there seems not to have 
been a voice raised against Mr. 
Warburg as a near-German. 



VOICES 

PERSONS who are in the habit 
of talking acceptably to the 
general public, and have 
acquired the advertisement incid- 
ent to that privilege, can make 
themselves heard, and are heard 
gladly, even in a din of war. The 
more the din and the bigger the 
babel of unidentified cries, the 
more acceptable is the sound of 
the voices that are familiar. 

Not many German voices are 
familiar here except those Germans 
or German-Americans who are re- 
sident in this country and speak 

43 



44 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK 

in English. Professor Munster- 
berg, of Harvard, has long-stand- 
ing habits of public admonition. 
We have heard abundantly from 
him since war began, and fully 
also from Professor Ernst Rich- 
ard, of Columbia. Both of these 
gentlemen chide us for our feeling 
that Germany needs to be dis- 
ciplined; both of them offer us 
pictures of her as the long-suffering 
defender of civilization and btil- 
wark of Europe against the insurg- 
ing Slav. Neither of them seems 
to feel that in Germany, as often 
happens elsewhere, prosperity has 
outrun manners. 

Voices from England come over 
the cables. We have had the 
more or less familiar tones of John 



VOICES 45 

Jay Chapman, shocked at being 
shoveled upon a train and herded 
out of Germany, recounting *'the 
awe-striking brutaHty of actual 
war," the disappearance in the 
handling of American refugees of 
''every decency existing in soci- 
ety," proclaiming that "the fu- 
ture of free government of the 
modern world is now being safe- 
guarded by blood and treasure by 
Britain" as it was in the days of 
Napoleon. 

We have had a remarkable voice 
from the dead, a vision of Tolstoi 
brought to notice and repeatedly 
reprinted, in which he foretold 
"the great conflagration" starting 
in 1 91 2 and developing into a 
destructive calamity in 1913, with 



46 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK 

all Europe in flames and bleeding 
and filled with the lamentations 
of huge battlefields. Out of the 
North, Tolstoi said, would come 
in 1 91 5 a strange figure, not a gen- 
eral, but a writer or a journalist, 
in whose grip most of Europe 
would remain until 1925. Finally 
would come a new political era for 
Europe, the end of empires and 
kingdoms, and the federation of 
the United States of Nations to 
hold the world for the four great 
giants — the Anglo-Saxons, the 
Latins, the Slavs, and the Mongo- 
lians. And another voice from the 
dead is Napoleon's: "In another 
hundred years Europe will be all 
republican or all Cossack." 

Through the World George Ber- 



VOICES 47 

nard Shaw has expounded, what 
seem to him, the defects in the 
deportment of the British Govern- 
ment towards Germany. Bernard 
would have thrown a good 
scare into Germany in time to 
give her warning of what to 
expect. 

Through the World also has 
come the liveliest voice of all, H. 
G. Wells, sure of what he has to 
say and saying it with penetra- 
tion; sure that ''the monstrous 
vanity that was begotten by the 
easy victories of 1870-71** has 
come to its inevitable catastrophe ; 
sure that "never was a war so 
righteous as is the war against 
Germany now,** glad it has come, 
glad to be in it, and keen to save 



48 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK 

the Germans when they have had 
their Hcking. 

Twice Wells has called out to us. 
In his second vociferation he is sure 
that the Belgian check prefigures 
how the war is going, and proceeds 
to the subdivision of Europe with 
a view first to save Germany and 
next to make the rest of Europe 
politically comfortable. He does 
it with intelligence, so that one 
hopes that when the Powers get 
around to this duty of map-mak- 
ing they will call in Mr. Wells and 
get his views. 

Of course, though, there may not 
be any available Powers left when 
the fighting stops. In that case 
what's to hinder Brother Wells 
from mending the map himself! 



VOICES 49 

''A writer out of the North," 
Tolstoi said, "is to have Europe in 
his hand for ten years!'* There's 
your chance, Brother Wells. 

Mr. Kipling must be talking 
to himself. His voice at this 
writing is still inaudible. And 
though Chesterton must be talk- 
ing, up to this time of writing 
he has not talked over the cable. 
But, heavens! How he must be 
thinking ! , 



THE DREAM OF DOMINATION 

OUR President has solemnly 
exhorted us all to keep 
our shirts on in the great 
existing crisis in human affairs 
and not to talk loud, and not to 
be partisan, but strictly neutral. 
We are going to. We are sin- 
cerely the friends of all those 
parties who are scrapping. There 
is not one of them that we do 
not yearn to benefit. We do not 
intend to meddle in their fight, 
except to help them stop when 
the time comes, and to bind up 
what wounds we can reach, and 
50 



THE DREAM OF DOMINATION 51 

carry food, perhaps, where it is 
needed. But, inasmuch as all of 
us read and some of us think, we 
are bound to have opinions on the 
merits of the controversy and 
hunches as to who ought to win 
and who is going to. In our be- 
havior we must be neutral to a 
hair's breadth ; but if in our minds 
and feelings we had no preferences 
in such a conflict and thought only 
of how it affected ourselves, we 
should be a good deal duller and 
more selfish people than we are. 
And behold ; all of us but a little 
band of German-born defenders of 
Germany seem to feel that it is 
for the interest of civilization that 
Germany should be beaten in this 
war. We cannot see the welfare 



52 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK 

of mankind in the domination of 
Europe by the kind of Germany 
that has been making in the 
last forty years. In this country 
we believe in democracy, and are 
committed to a great experiment 
with it. But if the Germany of 
Bismarck and the Kaiser is right 
and working on the right track by 
the right means, then we are wrong 
and proceeding in delusion, and our 
experiment will come to grief. If 
Bismarck and the Kaiser are right, 
blood and iron, militarism and 
autocracy, the strong hand and the 
mailed fist are the great tools of 
civilization. But not with such 
tools can democracy hope to suc- 
ceed. Its hope is all in justice and 
a fair deal, backed, no doubt, by 



THE DREAM OF DOMINATION 53 

armed men, but not dependent for 
its prosperity on armed aggression. 

What do we think of Germans? 
Consider what we think of them 
as immigrants in this country. 
Consider our anxieties about the 
annual throng of newcomers that 
passes through our ElHs Island 
gate. Dubious material for a 
democracy so many of them seem. 
But about Germans there has 
never been a misgiving. They 
have always been welcomed as 
a strengthening stock. Always 
wherever there has been a settle- 
ment of Germans it has been felt 
to be a settlement of people able to 
take care of themselves and to 
maintain, and in some respects 



54 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK 

improve, our standards of life. 
Certainly we have no antipathy 
to Germans; no racial distrust of 
them. 

But we do distrust the leading 
that Germany has had since 1870. 
We do consider that her people 
have been trained to follow a false 
ideal. We do consider that the 
policy of Bismarck corrupted her 
moral sense. A great man was 
Bismarck and a great deal good, 
but he lied without scruple, and he 
took for Germany without scruple 
or regard for justice anything that 
he thought would do Germany 
good. When he took Alsace and 
Lorraine he overdid the job and 
committed his unfortunate country 
to a hopeless debauch of militar- 



THE DREAM OF DOMINATION 55 

ism. Germany as we see it now 
is not the Germany of Goethe or 
Schiller, of the democrats of 1 848 ; 
it is the Germany of Bismarck, 
and of intense commercialism, 
and of success at any price. When 
Bismarck told in his memoirs how 
he changed the wording of the 
French ambassador's letter and 
brought on the war in 1870, it was 
notice given to mankind that in 
diplomatic concerns the word of 
Germany may not be trusted. 
When the German troops crossed 
the Belgian frontier it confirmed 
the existing impression that pro- 
mises of the German Government 
are only good so long as enforce- 
able by the promisee. To Ameri- 
cans who did not understand the 



56 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK 

spirit and morals of the German 
Government, the invasion of Bel- 
gium brought a shock something 
like the shock that came two years 
ago when the Outlook disclosed the 
theory of the three cups of coffee. 
Something important seemed to 
crumble. Germany stood revealed 
as, governmentally, a vast and 
ruthless commercial organization, 
bound by no scruple, committed 
to the belief that might is the only 
right, and ready to crush and de- 
stroy any obstacle in her path. 

Nothing is comparable in im- 
portance to the Germans with be- 
ing detached from that terrible 
dream of domination. Their 
teachers and government seem 



THE DREAM OF DOMINATION 57 

to have an obsession that un- 
less the Germans take charge 
of the world and give orders 
to all its peoples the world will 
go to pot. They are sincere, 
apparently, in the belief that the 
Slavs will bite the head off of 
civilization unless the German war 
lord can bite the head off of 
the Slavs. But the Slavs are a 
nimierous and husky people, fairly 
good stock, and coming along 
fast. It is conceivable that the 
Almighty intended that they, too, 
shall have a place in the sun. 
There is lots of room for them, 
especially in Asia. Why this 
urgent necessity to bite off their 
so numerous heads? Is it that the 
world from the German point of 



58 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK 

view has only two kinds of nations 
— those whom she can thrash, and 
those who might thrash her? Is 
it an essential part of the militar- 
istic conception that everybody on 
earth must some time be fought 
and, if possible, thrashed? Is it 
that terrible obsession that has left 
Germany without one zealous 
friend in all the earth and with 
only one ally in Europe? We 
people of the United States seem 
to be the best friends she has in the 
world, the most solicitous for her 
true welfare, the most anxious to 
save the pieces of her if she gets 
broken. But we don't like her 
militarism, nor believe in her 
theory that the Teuton is the Only 
Hope. It is no vital defect in her 



THE DREAM OF DOMINATION 59 

people, but a dreadful misdirec- 
tion of leadership that has got her, 
as we see it, into a war in which 
defeat will be disaster but victory 
would be ruin. Yes, ruin infalli- 
bly; for there is not room on 
earth for the Germany of the 
Kaiser's hopes and Bismarck's 
purposes. There is no place, no 
possible toleration, for a super- 
man nation that would dominate 
mankind. The Germans must be 
content to be good people, living 
among good people and polite to 
them. That is the best that the 
future offers to any nation. 



WILL THEY GET TO PARIS? 

WITH the din of Europe 
continuously in our ears 
our poor affairs at home 
get but a slight hearing. Europe 
is in the condition of a village with 
a mad dog careering up and down 
its main street. We read day by 
day, and many times a day, of the 
Germans creeping nearer to Paris, 
and wonder if they will get there. 
When the Allies stand them off 
somewhere the hearts of most of 
us rise a little ; when the Allies get 
a setback our hearts sink. Then 

we feel that Lord Kitchener is 
60 



WILL THEY GET TO PARIS? 6i 

probably right in forecasting a war 
that will go over the winter — per- 
haps two winters, perhaps three. 
What seems unthinkable is Europe 
with the German foot on her neck : 
Belgium absorbed, France pros- 
trated and Germanized, England 
subdued — our turn to come next. 
Are there Germans enough to 
accomplish that? One cannot 
think it. It is conceivable that 
Paris may be taken, but while 
England has a navy and Russia 
an army, how can Germany dictate 
terms to Europe? Nothing that 
she has accomplished so far is 
incompatible with her final un- 
doing, but, as Kitchener says, it 
may take time. 

There are those who hold that 



62 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK 

Germany is unbeatable ; that she is 
so superior in the military art and 
in war power as the result of forty 
years of close devotion to those 
details that she can go out and 
take anything she wants from 
nations powerless to defend their 
own against her. President G. 
Stanley Hall, of Clark University, 
in Worcester, has put this idea into 
words as clearly as anyone. Ger- 
many's war personality now in con- 
trol of her, he says, is Nietzsche's ; 
a worship of power, whereof 
the ethics is: "Do, be, get every- 
thing you have the strength to do. 
Pity is a vice. Evolution means 
the survival of the fittest and the 
destruction of the unfit. Chris- 
tianity with its sympathies for the 



WILL THEY GET TO PARIS? 63 

poor in spirit means decadence — 
was a disease. The world belongs 
to those who have the might to get 
it, and treaties, peace-pacts, arbi- 
tration, are mere points of strategy 
to deceive other nations." This 
philosophy, Dr. Hall says, has 
taken a deeper hold of the German 
mind than any other ever has 
since Hegel. A large proportion of 
Germany's ablest men have done 
nothing but study war, and that 
so secretly that the other nations 
of Europe have been taken 
unawares. The war, so far, fol- 
lows Bernhardi's book, and pro- 
bably will to the end, barring 
accidents. No power. Dr. Hall 
thinks, could resist Germany's 
five and a half millions of armed 



64 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK 

men, trained to the last point of 
warfare. 



Perhaps not, but most of us 
Americans will live, barring acci- 
dents, to see. If Germany *s 
controlling mind has been formed 
by Nietzsche and her hands 
taught to make his theories good, 
then in very truth a mad dog is 
loose in the main street of Europe. 
But what happens to mad dogs? 
They give the villagers a frightful 
scare; they bring death to some, 
but in the end, poor creatures, if 
they are not killed they die of their 
disease. 

Nietzsche's philosophy and mili- 
tarism are fatal diseases. In so 
far as Germany has got them she 



WILL THEY GET TO PARIS? 65 

will die. There is death in them, 
not life. 

It is impossible that this Niet- 
zsche rabies runs all through Ger- 
many. It will have to be localized 
and expelled. Dr. Hall's conclu- 
sions are not to his own liking. 
He does not wish to see them come 
true, and if he is a prudent man he 
will hedge on them. If he can find 
some one to give him fair odds 
against the proposition that the 
meek shall inherit the earth, let 
him bet a little something on the 
meek. They are a much better 
risk than Dr. Hall seems to 
think. A deep principle of hu- 
man life works for them im- 
mutably, and once they start 
fighting they are liable to keep 



66 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK 

at it in their modest way for a 
long time. 

The Nietzsche-Bernhardi theory 
is incredible to ordinary people. 
They think it is a crazy man's 
joke. But once they learn it is real, 
there is nothing to do but beat it 
or die. Life in a Nietzsche-Bern- 
hardi world would not be worth 
living. At this writing, after what 
the Belgians have done and are 
doing, and with what the French 
are doing for themselves, and with 
what the stubborn English are 
doing to help them, and with 
those loud thumps by Russia at 
Germany's back door, things do 
not seem to justify Dr. Hall's 
fears. 



WILL THEY GET TO PARIS? 67 

If the Germans have become 
detached for the time from their 
Christian inheritance and are ac- 
tuated just now by Nietzsche- 
Bernhardi philosophy, there is 
no use of making so much re- 
monstrance about dropping bombs 
in Antwerp. Of course they 
will drop bombs anywhere they 
seem likely to put the unfit out of 
commission. If they have gone 
back to first principles we must 
expect a war more like what war 
was before first principles were 
modified. General Miles says this 
will probably be the last great 
war. No doubt it will be the last 
great war for the present. One 
of the discouraging things about 
schools is that the instructed 



68 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK 

scholars are continually getting out 
of them and green ones coming in. 
It is the same about nations and 
war. The generation that knows 
about war is constantly dying 
and being replaced by a gener- 
ation that has to be taught. If 
this is to be the last great war for a 
long, long time it will have to be 
followed by a prodigious rearrange- 
ment of Europe. And no doubt 
it will be, however it comes out. 
Meanwhile we have the German 
apologists holding forth about the 
Slav peril, and the German armies 
using every means to kill or dis- 
able all their natural allies against 
the Slav. That is the way the 
Nietzsche philosophy works. Re- 
lying solely on aggression, it im- 



WILL THEY GET TO PARIS? 69 

piites aggressive intentions to all 
its neighbors and takes such pre- 
cautions against them as to force 
all the neighbors to band together 
to save their lives. 

Of course this immense dis- 
turbance of the world is going 
to affect us in all our interests 
and in our politics. Our fiscal 
machinery is very much upset, 
our markets are disarranged; a 
great many of our workers have 
already lost employment; we are 
going to see high prices for food 
and diminution of the wages fund. 
The great German workshop for 
the time being is dead. Nothing 
that we have been used to send to 
it can go; nothing we have been 



70 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK 

used to get from it can come. The 
other workshops of Europe are 
also very much disarranged by the 
drawing off of so many men to war. 
These considerations will affect 
our politics very promptly. In 
hazardous times partisanship lags, 
and folks want safe men in charge. 
We want the full ability of the 
country to be at the service of the 
Government, and a government 
ready to avail itself of the full 
ability of the country. It is no 
time for selfish politics. The 
world is afire, and our affair is to 
stand by with the best apparatus 
we can supply to help put out the 
blaze and save the burned-out 
people. 



BACKING AWAY FROM PARIS 

WAR is our apology to the 
animals for the way we 
kill them. When need 
calls hard enough, man takes his 
place in his turn in the line to the 
shambles. The story of Europe as 
it comes just now is too much like 
another tale of the stockyards by a 
superheated Upton Sinclair. The 
part of an American citizen con- 
tinues to be to sit in a chair where 
the breeze can reach him and 
read about killings. The reading 
is wonderful, but the part is not 
a glorious part, and one feels 
71 



72 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK 

ashamed at times not to siiffer 
more and struggle more when 
anguish and struggle on such a 
stupendous scale are going on. 

Morning, noon, and night we 
read about it in our newspapers. 
We are fascinated by the story, so 
unreal, so portentous, so tremend- 
ous. Whatever our work is, it 
becomes a routine that we go 
through with perfunctorily and 
drop when it is done to go back to 
the great war serial of which there 
is a fresh installment twice a day. 
This is ''the Day" which German 
officers in wardrooms of battle- 
ships and messrooms of army 
headquarters have stood up to 
drink to these many years past. 

How is it going? 



BACKING AWAY FROM PARIS 73 

Not yet, after forty days of 
fighting, is there any outcome that 
seems decisive as to the result. 
The furor Teutonicus of which we 
have had warning from Professor 
Richard has all its cylinders in 
action. The Germans, said Dr. 
Richard, in the Outlook, "are de- 
termined to win at any cost, and 
after their victory to leave their 
enemies in such shape that they 
will never be able to disturb the 
peace again. " That expresses the 
underlying purpose of this war — 
the annihilation of all obstacles to 
Germany^s supremacy in Europe. 
What we learn of the proceedings 
in France indicates that it is being 
pressed with an energy altogether 
prodigious and unprecedented in 



74 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK 

warfare. But there is a counter 
movement going on, not quite 
so energetic, but remarkably reso- 
lute and considerably effective, to 
leave the Germans in such shape 
that their neighbors in Europe 
may give due attention to the 
rational enjoyment of life. Un- 
happily, this involves digging a 
vast number of Germans under the 
ground, and by the accounts we 
get the preliminaries for that rem- 
edy are being faithfully attended 
to. The Germans have made a 
wonderful advance on Paris, but 
they have met such a skillful and 
stubborn resistance, and suffered, 
apparently, such enormous losses 
that the question is, how many 
of them are left? What we won- 



BACKING AWAY FROM PARIS 75 

der is, How long can they keep it 
up, and can they finish France 
and England before Russia bursts 
through their back door? 

Hereabouts, frankly enough, we 
hope they can't, and our opinions 
follow our hopes. In spite of all 
the wonder of the German ad- 
vance, the Germans seem to us to 
be in a tighter place than the 
Allies. They can stand a wonder- 
ful lot of killing while they last, but 
are there enough of them? The 
Juror Teutonicus undoubtedly has 
justified Dr. Richard's high opin- 
ion of it, but it cannot re-animate 
the dead. 

This war may be known in time, 
if anyone is left alive to write about 



76 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK 

it, as The Great Misunderstanding. 
Everybody concerned in it seems to 
have misunderstood. The Kaiser, 
strong for fattening peace and 
strong in his conviction that arma- 
ment would secure it, became the 
business partner of Herr Krupp, 
and gleaned his passing profit in 
the making of guns. His motives 
being misunderstood, the neigh- 
bors got the idea that he was pre- 
paring for war, and all stocked up 
forthwith and kept at it to the 
limit of their ability and beyond. 
Bismarck, the friend of Motley, 
a great deal wiser and kindlier man 
than, just now, he gets credit for 
being, misunderstood the French 
when he supposed that the defeat 
of 1870 would set easier on them if 



BACKING AWAY FROM PARIS 77 

he relieved them of the care of 
Alsace and Lorraine. When it 
came to the pinch about Servia, 
the Kaiser and the war-lords seem 
to have misunderstood everybody : 
Russia in thinking she would back 
down if gruffly addressed, Eng- 
land in thinking she would grab 
at a ridiculous bribe and had no 
prejudice against infamy, Belgium 
in supposing she would merely 
whimper when trampled on, all of 
Europe and the rest of mankind in 
entertaining the astonishing idea 
that the nations were more afraid 
of Russia than of the Kaiser and 
his Krupps and the Juror Teutoni- 
cus. Was ever there so misunder- 
stood and so misunderstanding a 
victim as the poor Kaiser! Our 



78 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK 

heart bleeds for him. One would 
like to help him in his extremity. 
Would he care to have a gallant 
ex-naval officer who won renown 
once in a tight pinch and might 
be useful at Heligoland? Take 
him, Kaiser! Take our Hobson! 
Entirely at our risk as to him, 
though, of course, at your risk as 
to you. 



THE CASE OF THE KAISER 

THE chief blame for the war 
in Europe is laid here- 
abouts on the Kaiser. 
Maybe that is just, maybe not, 
but this seems apparent: that, 
whether the Kaiser did right or 
wrong, he did his duty as he saw 
it. One may think he did terribly 
wrong and yet acquit him of con- 
scious fault, of selfishness, of every 
thing but a m^isconception of the 
contemporary world and his part 
in it. 

The Kaiser does not believe 
in representative government for 

79 



8o THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK 

Germany. He does not believe in 
democracy, at least not for Ger- 
many. Neither did Bismarck. 
Bismarck doubtless believed a 
good deal in Bismarck, partly as 
the agent of the Almighty, partly 
as Bismarck, director of the Ger- 
man people. Government of Ger- 
many by Bismarck through his 
Kaiser was representative govern- 
ment of a sort, for Bismarck in 
a way was representative. The 
Kaiser does not believe in that. 
He discharged Bismarck at once. 
He believes in government by 
the Kaiser as the agent divinely 
appointed to govern the German 
people. He is not responsible to 
the German people for what he 
does, but to the Almighty. He 



THE CASE OF THE KAISER 8i 

believes— he must believe— that 
he is competent to judge what is 
right for Germany and that when 
he does it he has God for his ally. 
That goes far to make him the 
resolute man that he is, but it 
makes him mighty dangerous. Of 
course he wants to do Germany 
good, for he is a devoted soul, and 
Germany is his duty and his 
ambition. Doubtless he would 
give his Hfe for her; give it cheer- 
fully. The trouble with him and 
his theory is that in most of the 
affairs of men many heads are 
better than one. In spite of the 
craziness of mobs, in the long 
run, the sanity of many minds is 
more durable and less subject to 
delusion than the sanity of one 



82 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK 

mind. The successful kings and 
emperors nowadays are persons 
employed by the people they nom- 
inally govern. Some of the em- 
ployed kings are very valuable and 
useful, but "divine right" rulers 
like the Kaiser, however good 
and able and sincere, are utterly 
out of date in forward-looking 
countries in this age of the world. 
To us who believe and hope in 
democracy the Kaiser seems a 
tragedy. He has hitched his wag- 
on to the wrong star. He is able, 
he is engaging, he is likeable, a 
good husband, a dutiful father, 
a good man. He would have 
made a tip-top Kaiser if only he 
could have got on a contemporary 
basis with the German people and 



THE CASE OF THE KAISER 83 

realized that they should be his 
boss and not he theirs. Employed 
by them he might be useful, for 
they like him and he them, but an 
autocratic ruler for such a people 
as the modern Germans is an 
anachronism, and the probable fate 
of the Kaiser is to prove it so. 
The great destructive machine 
which he has spent his strength to 
perfect has got away from him, 
and is doing its appointed work of 
devastation. Where he will be, 
or in what case, when its wheels 
cease to turn no one can foretell. 



A COMPLAINT FROM THE KAISER 

THE complaintof the German 
Kaiser to our Mr. Wilson 
about the thousands of 
dum-dum bullets found in the 
French fort of Longwy affords 
affecting evidence of the Kaiser's 
disposition to swallow what is 
handed to him. This is the 
Kaiser's first considerable war, 
and having had probably little 
practice in separating true news 
from false, he doubtless believes 
that all his good Germans have 
been behaving like gentlemen, and 
that the Belgians, French, and 
84 



THE KAISER'S COMPLAINT 85 

British have done many repre- 
hensible naughtinesses. In this 
country, where our minds are 
newspaper-fed, and where to cut a 
pack of lies and turn up the truth 
is an exploit done instinctively and 
repeatedly in the course of the day's 
reading, we have learned to take all 
reports of atrocities in war with 
allowances. Consider our recent 
war in Colorado, and the incident 
of the militia and the burning of 
the miner's camp. The various 
versions of that story contradict 
one another just as the versions of 
the story of Louvain do. 

If Mr. Wilson should reply to 
the Kaiser's remonstrance, ''Well, 
Kaiser, everybody's doin' it," that 
would indicate one way to deal with 



86 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK 

atrocity stories. Either believe all 
you read from both sides or else 
reject all. But to believe all the 
tales of German cruelties and re- 
ject all the tales of anti-German 
cruelties is not intelligent. War 
is terribly cruel. It lets loose 
hordes of men, the bulk of whom 
are humane but including many 
who are not humane. Moreover, 
war excites and intensifies the 
passions, and may brutalize even 
the kindly. It is not incredible 
that Belgian peasants, infuriated 
by their sufferings, took dreadful 
vengeance on wounded Germans. 
And, of course, it is not incredible 
that some Germans took terrible 
vengeance on helpless Belgians. 
When five or six million men are 



THE KAISER'S COMPLAINT 87 

practicing to kill one another, why 
bother about these details or fret 
because some women and children 
and other non-combatants are 
killed? It is the war that is terri- 
ble, not these poor, dreadful inci- 
dents of it. To try to make war 
nice is poppy-cock. After we 
have read of trenches filled and 
fields heaped with dead young 
Germans at Liege, and with Ger- 
mans and Frenchmen and English- 
men along a line two hundred 
miles wide from Liege to Paris, 
this protest from the Kaiser about 
dum-dum bullets sounds like a 
joke. 

The poor Kaiser! The papers 
quote the late British General 



88 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK 

Grierson, who had been military 
attache at Berlin, as saying of 
him: "He's all right; he's a gentle- 
man. But those around him are 
perfectly poisonous." 

Just how much hand, immedi- 
ately and personally, the Kaiser 
had in bringing on the war is not 
known yet, but a theory that com- 
mends itself to credulity holds the 
poisonous Prussian war party re- 
sponsible for getting Germany into 
this war while the Kaiser was off 
on his summer holiday in Norway. 
The proceedings as to the stiffening 
of Austria's backbone in her deal- 
ings with Servia were doubtless 
agreed upon before the Kaiser left 
his capital. Austria was to mobi- 
lize against Servia, but it seems 



THE KAISER'S COMPLAINT 89 

to have been expected, and there 
seems to have been a supposition 
that it had been arranged that 
Russia would do nothing more than 
protest in Servians behalf. But 
when Russia fooled this expecta- 
tion by mobilizing, the Kaiser was 
away, and then, apparently, the 
Crown Prince and all the fire- 
eaters rushed matters so hard that 
before the Kaiser could get back 
the country was committed to fight 
Russia. That meant France, too, 
and then, to Germany's horror, 
England joined them, leaving 
German diplomacy flat on its back 
and the war squad in control of 
everything. 

If that is a true story, and the 
Kaiser was thus caught in the 



90 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK 

machinery he has so labored to 
create, still it was his machinery 
that caught him, and it all only 
illustrates the saying that those 
who live by the sword shall perish 
by the sword. 

The war news at this writing is 
all of a successful stand by the 
Allies in France on the line from 
Paris to Verdun, and the driving 
back of the Germans. But we 
only know generally what is going 
on. It is fight, fight, fight; a 
tremendous engagement of huge 
armies along a long line, with 
apparent advantage for the Allies. 
If the defenders merely hold their 
own in this fighting they are ahead. 
For the Germans to hold their own 



THE KAISER'S COMPLAINT 91 

is not enough. They must con- 
quer or get out. 

All the forecasts of students and 
predictions of prophets, seers, wiz- 
ards, witches, holy men, clairvoy- 
ants, and sooth-sayers have been 
widely published and have made 
interesting reading of late. We all 
want to see a little farther ahead 
than the unaided vision can pene- 
trate. Some attractive long-dis- 
tance prophecies have set Nov- 
ember as the month in which the 
Kaiser is to lose his empire. That 
may follow, of course, if this enor- 
mous battle between Paris and 
Verdun goes decisively against the 
the invaders and the Russian suc- 
cesses continue. 



92 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK 

There is a pious beauty about 
the phrasing of the Httle proclama- 
tion in which President Wilson calls 
upon ''all God-fearing persons'* 
to pray on October 4th for the 
restoration of peace in Europe. 
It reads like a collect out of the 
Episcopal prayer-book. Europe's 
needs are urgent. It is to be 
hoped that she will not be past 
praying for on the first Sunday 
in October. 



THE PATHOS OF THE GERMANS 

NO doubt in our character as 
neutrals we ought to be 
as sorry as we can for 
everybody involved in the great 
war, without stopping to be over- 
nice in apportioning blame; sorry 
for the Kaiser because he has been 
caught in his machinery; sorry for 
France and England and Germany 
because, being considerably civil- 
ized, they should not be under the 
terrible cost and inconvenience of 
battling with one another; sorry 
for the Serbs, and for Austria 
93 



94 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK 

because she is such a back number ; 
sorry most of all for the gallant 
Belgians who have suffered so 
much, and least perhaps for Rus- 
sia whom nothing can hurt very 
deep and whose chances of gain 
are biggest in proportion to what 
she risks. 

And coming to particulars, we 
ought especially to be sorry for the 
Germans. As we see them to-day 
they are a pathetic people. Ger- 
many has set up to be the bully 
of Europe, and a bully, when one 
has got over being mad at him, 
is always pathetic. . Bullies are 
always stupid. At the bottom of 
their proceedings is inability to 
understand something very import- 
ant to be understood. They are 



PATHOS OF THE GERMANS 95 

people who, seeing no chance to 
get what they want by favor, are 
constantly tempted to try to get 
what they can by force. 

That seems to be the case with 
the Germans. They have enor- 
mous merit of a most substantial 
kind, and it has brought them 
huge and well-earned gains; but 
when it comes to getting anything 
by favor there is nothing com- 
ing to them. In his present stage 
of development, the German is 
the fat man of Europe whom no- 
body loves. Individual Germans 
are beloved, of course, but the 
typical German not. A writer in 
the Outlook, an American of Ger- 
man parentage, writing in defense 
of his brethren, explains the uni- 



96 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK 

versal distaste for Germans in 
Europe by saying: 

'*The average German, whom 
the foreigner sees, is aggressive, 
self-assertive, loud in his manner 
and talk, inconsiderate, petty, 
pompous, dictatorial, without hu- 
mor; in a word, bumptious. He 
has, in many cases, exceedingly bad 
table manners and an almost gross 
enjoyment of his food ; and he talks 
about his ailments and his under- 
wear. His attitude toward wom- 
en, moreover, is likely to be over- 
gallant if he knows them a little 
and not too well, and discourteous 
or even insolent if he is married to 
them or does not know them at all. 
He is at his worst at the time when 
he is most on exhibition, when he 
is on his travels or helping other 



PATHOS OF THE GERMANS 97 

people to travel, as ticket-chopper 
or customs official.** 



This German apologist knows 
that underneath bad manners 
which the German does not know 
are bad are some of the greatest 
and best of human qualities, but 
casual observers don't like the 
manners and naturally don't like 
the man; so Germans, apparently, 
have been taught that every hand 
in Etirope is against them, and 
that they must always expect to 
fight for what they get and thrash 
all comers. Hence militarism and 
all the troubles that follow it. 

A little while ago English man- 
ners were just as ill thought of. 



98 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK 

and doubtless with just as good 
reason, as German manners are 
now; but English manners seem 
to have improved. American 
tourist manners do not edify all 
foreign observers, but bad man- 
ners in our tourists do not have 
political consequences. Refine- 
ment usually comes with pros- 
perity, and has come abundantly 
to Germans in the United States. 
German prosperity at home has 
mostly come within the last thirty 
years, and probably it would in 
time have brought manners in its 
train, and possibly as Germans 
grew to be more generally accep- 
table they would have emerged 
from this terrible idea that they 
must thrash all the world in 



PATHOS OF THE GERMANS 99 

order to get their place in the 
sun. 

When prosperity will resume its 
refining course among the Germans 
in Germany heaven knows, but is 
not their situation sincerely pa- 
thetic? Not only are the manners 
of ordinary Germans open to such 
regretful criticism as above quoted, 
but the example set to ordinary 
Germans by their superiors in 
rank and power seems far from 
helpful. Professor Newbold, of 
Philadelphia, who fled through 
Germany the other day, is quoted 
in the papers as saying : 

''The war was caused by a little 
group of military men who aim 
at the conquest of the world. 



loo THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK 

They are the most offensive people 
I have ever met. They are re- 
sponsible to no one for their ac- 
tions and they lit the fuse.*' 

But as to the mass of ordinary 
Germans whom he saw, he says: 

**I never before saw such despair 
and misery written on the faces 
of people as I saw in Germany 
when war was declared. They 
felt and looked as though the end 
of the world had come." 

Be sorry for the Germans. 
They are in for a terrible time. 
At the bottom they are good and 
extremely able and valuable peo- 
ple, but they have been tied up to 
a wrong conception of what rules 
ovu" modern world. If the war rids 



PATHOS OF THE GERMANS loi 

them of the domination of *' mili- 
tary men who aim at the conquest 
of the world,'* there is no reason 
why they should not grow in favor; 
but no country that all the others 
fear can hope to be popular in a 
modern world. 



A FOUNDLING 

THIS is distinctly a foundling 
war that is going on in 
Europe. Nobody is will- 
ing to father it. One after another 
the nations concerned have stood 
up and made formal declaration 
that it was no war of theirs, but 
an unwelcome charge left on their 
doorstep. It will take court pro- 
ceedings to trace its paternity, but 
persons who have duly read the 
papers, white and other kinds, 
incline strongly to the suspicion 
that the war is the love-child of the 

German General Staff. Nobody 
1 02 



A FOUNDLING 103 

else in Europe seems to have 
wanted it, not even the Kaiser. 
The story that the Staff fooled him 
with a story that the Russians — or 
was it the French? — had crossed 
his frontier is just such another 
tale as that of Bismarck and the 
Kaiser's grandpa, and sounds so 
likely that we hope that in due time 
the German people will take the 
matter up with their General Staff 
and get the rights of it. If they 
conclude that the war was a mis- 
take for them and that the Staff 
got them into it on false pretenses, 
to hang so many of the Staff as 
they can catch would seem not to 
be out of the way. 

And perhaps there are professors 
left alive in Germany with whom 



104 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK 

some settlement may be in pros- 
pect. When one considers what 
this war is for, the answer here- 
abouts is that it is to correct cer- 
tain obsessions that have grown 
up in the German mind as a conse- 
quence of wicked and erroneous 
philosophy and teaching. The 
gospel of force, of assault, of rob- 
bery, has been preached openly 
and effectively in Germany for a 
generation. Nietzsche preached it 
until his madness became uncon- 
trollable, and Treitschke, Von 
Sybel, Von Bernhardi, and heaven 
knows how many others. They 
got it into the more or less innocent 
German head that it belonged to 
the Germans to dominate the rest 
of mankind. To get that idea out 



A FOUNDLING 105 

of the German head, out utterly 
and permanently, is what this 
great war is primarily about. 

Secondarily, it is a war against 
the whole idea of militarist domin- 
ation ; a war against brute force ; a 
war to keep the terrible obsession 
that has brought Germany and all 
Europe to so dreadful a pass from 
lodging in the mind of any other 
people for some time to come. It 
is not a war of the English to 
crush German trade; not primarily 
a war of the French to get back 
their lost provinces; not a war 
of the Belgians to conquer Ger- 
many; not a war of Russia to get 
Constantinople; not a war of any- 
body for . any detail of trade, or 
revenge, or advantage, but a war 



io6 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK 

of all hands to destroy militarism 
and the gospel of force, and bring 
peace and equity back into the 
world. 

It is a terrible job to beat the 
gospel of force and make peace 
universally popular. This present 
try at it seems to be going along 
as well as could be expected. The 
Nietzscheans are still extremely 
efficient. Rheims Cathedral, bat- 
tered and burned, now attests, 
along with Louvain, their savage 
competence in destruction. Cer- 
tainly the Vandals and the Huns 
had nothing on the Germans as 
destroyers of the monuments of 
beauty and of piety. Beaten back 
on the Marne, the Kaiser's troops 



A FOUNDLING 107 

are making, at this writing, a for- 
midable stand on the Aisne, where 
there has been a week's fighting, 
but as yet without decisive mili- 
tary results. 

The German rush is over, the 
Allies, having managed, like good 
shoppers, to avoid or survive it, 
are at it now, ding-dong, to get the 
idea of conquest out of the obsti- 
nate German head, preparatory to 
introducing there some less danger- 
ous conceptions of the duty and 
destiny of man. There seems to 
be going on a vast killing of men in 
France, not to mention the whole- 
sale operations in that line which 
we hear of on the other side of 
Germany. Truly a bad philoso- 
phy is a very fatal thing and 



io8 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK 

desperately hard to eradicate. If 
missionaries could have converted 
Germany to the paths of peace, 
that would have been the thriftier 
way, but what could missionaries 
have done when a large proportion 
of the Germans are abundantly 
religious and suppose that they are 
Christians already, and the rest 
don't want to be? 

Suggestions of peace have been 
made to our President, but amount 
to nothing as yet. Neither side is 
ready for them. The talk is still 
of a pretty long war in which 
settlement will be reached by pro- 
cesses of exhaustion. When it 
comes to that, the feeling of the 
Allies is that England and France 



A FOUNDLING 109 

with control of the sea can stand 
more of it than harbor-bound 
Germany can; while Russia is 
inexhaustible. That is dreadful 
sounding talk, but, of course, it is 
a hard job to get the poison of a 
rotten philosophy out of the heads 
of a strong, obstinate, and very 
numerous people. Some devils 
come out, as the Scripture says, 
only by prayer and fasting. We 
are going to try prayer on a large 
scale on October 4th, and with 
fasting there has been much experi- 
ment in the field already, with 
very much more extended tests in 
prospect if the war continues long. 

Only long-distance predictions 
of this war*s results have any 



no THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK 

chance as yet. It has gone far 
enough now to prove that no one 
is to have an easy victory. The 
Allies on the defensive seem able to 
stand ofE the Germans; the Ger- 
mans on the defensive seem able 
to stand off the Allies. It looks 
as though the German invasion 
of France was a failure, but the 
German defense of Germany, if it 
comes to that, promises to be a 
very hard nut for the Allies to 
crack. That is one thing that 
gives gravity to the talk of a long 
war. 

But speculation about these 
immediate details is futile. The 
mind dwells rather on the ultimate 
result to mankind of these tremen- 
dous forces of disarrangement. 



A FOUNDLING iii 

The most fantastic prophecies, like 
Tolstoi's vision and that queer 
seventeenth century prediction 
put out by Figaro J get attention 
because they range so far ahead. 
The future of the world has not, 
for a century at least, been so 
utterly uncertain. It is as Mr. 
Root said the other day at Ham- 
ilton College: 

** This dreadful war, with its ter- 
rible destruction and misery, marks 
the end of an epoch and the begin- 
ning of a new day for the world. 
No man can tell just what the end 
will be. We are on the threshold 
of that new day in which the 
associations of men are taking new 
forms and new opportunities and 
are leaving behind everything that 
has gone before." 



112 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK 

That is the point. Behind this 
awful cloud that obscures Europe 
there is something like a new hea- 
ven and a new earth, and we want 
to know what they will be like. 
This is not a war of hatreds. 
Hatreds may be bred in it, have 
been bred in it, especially in Bel- 
gium — ^but they did not cause it. 
What caused it was fears and 
obsessions. It is all a dreadful 
cautery of life to get the madness 
out of it. It even seems as if the 
nations that have kept out of it, 
especially Italy, are half anxious 
to get in for fear they will miss 
the treatment. 

Maurice Maeterlinck, a Belgian, 
says the Belgians must not forget 



A FOUNDLING 113 

their terrible experiences nor feel 
presently that, after all, the mass 
of Germans may not be so bad. 
''We must be pitiless," he says; 
"the Germans are guilty in the 
mass ; they did what it was in them, 
and always will be in them, to do; 
they must be destroyed like wasps. 
Let there come a thousand years 
of civilization, of peace, with all 
refinements, the German spirit 
will remain absolutely the same 
as to-day, and, given opportunity, 
would declare itself under the same 
aspect and with the same infamy. " 

Maurice seems to be a good deal 
stirred up. Probably he has been 
to Louvain. But to destroy the 
Germans is too large a contract. 

Moreover, this idea that a whole 



114 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK 

race of men s incurably impossible, 
though excusable in Maeterlinck 
for the moment, is a very mis- 
chievous idea. It is cousin to the 
idea the Germans seem to have 
cviltivated about the Slav, and to 
their further notion that the Teu- 
ton is the Only Hope. But ''Teu- 
ton" in the German mind includes 
all the races of Northern Europe — 
British, French, Belgian, Dutch, 
Scandinavian, Celt, and even Slav 
itself, unless it is too much mixed 
with infusions from Asia. The 
Germans have not professed a 
pious purpose to destroy even the 
Slavs "like wasps," and as to the 
Belgians, their professions about 
them were most polite. All the 
Germans want of the Belgians is 



A FOUNDLING 115 

complete control of their country 
and their great port. They have 
not professed yet to see a need to 
exterminate the Belgians. Ger- 
manized and subjected to the 
direction and discipline of the 
German military caste, the Bel- 
gians might look pretty good to 
Germany. 

Of course that is what gives 
intensity to Maeterlinck's wrath 
and gives extension to the senti- 
ment that when the final settle- 
ment comes Belgium ought to have 
Berlin. 

' The wonderful rush of the Ger- 
man armies from Belgium to Paris 
was immensely instructive. So 
were the reports of the exhaustion 
of the German troops when they 



Ii6 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK 

had reached the side-lines of Paris 
and had to begin to retreat. 

A terrible, terrible thing is the 
furor Teutonicus; dangerous to all 
comers, but especially to Teutons. 
What will the survivors of those 
driven battalions of Germany 
think about it when they get 
home? They have seen the furor 
Teutonicus at work; they have felt 
the drive of it; they have been 
subject to the orders of the agents 
of it; have been goaded by their 
swords, lashed sometimes across 
their faces by their whips. They 
have seen German lives spent as 
lives have never been spent before 
in Western Europe. They will 
know the terrible futility of that 
expenditure. What will they 



A FOUNDLING 117 

think of the furor TeutonicuSy of 
militarism, of govermnent by a 
caste? 

Can they think? Can the com- 
mon Germans think? Or has the 
power to think been thrashed out 
of them under mihtary discipHne? 



THE UNSCRAMBLING OF EUROPE 

THE interesting thing ahead 
when the fighting is fin- 
ished is the unscrambling 
of Europe. The German mind 
takes no account of it. It is all for 
making Europe a great German 
trust, capitalized high enough to 
give a huge profit on the war, full 
of subsidiaries, and with "com- 
mon" and *' preferred" and the 
other trimmings. The German 
idea is to do all that by main 
strength and then keep it done by 
main strength. The plan has all 
the charms that made the argu- 

Ii8 



UNSCRAMBLING OF EUROPE 119 

ment for our big trusts — economy 
and efficiency of administration, 
capacity to do large things on a 
large scale, and all that. All the 
small, independent concerns of 
Europe would be incorporated into 
the big German trust, and made 
fabulously profitable to the owners 
by a perfected organization and 
the extirpation of competition. 
No more Belgium, no more Hol- 
land, no Switzerland, as little 
England as possible, a pared-down 
France, and a grand, gigantic Ger- 
many. 

But the English idea seems to be 
quite different. 

"We want this war to settle the 
map of Europe on national lines 
and according to the true wishes of 



I20 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK 

the people who dwell in the dis- 
puted areas. 

** After all the blood that is being 
shed we want a natural and har- 
monious settlement which liber- 
ates races, restores the integrity of 
nations, subjugates no one and 
permits a genuine and lasting 
relief from the waste and tension 
of armaments under which we 
suffered so long." 

So Winston Churchill, first 
Lord of the Admiralty, and what 
he says is a proper sentiment for 
England who cannot hope to oc- 
cupy this world by her unaided 
force, and has need of contented 
neighbors to work with. Part of 
the great problem will be to devise 
due possibilities of contentment 
for all the Germans except the 



UNSCRAMBLING OF EUROPE 121 

military caste, and not even that 
can the Allies shirk. There will 
be sixty-odd million very valuable 
Germans left when the war is 
over, and that is far too many 
people to be left with punctured 
hopes or without a satisfying 
vision of the future. Somehow 
matters must be handled so that 
in twenty years Germans will say: 
"After all, it was a good war for 
us. It delivered us from militar- 
ism and Pan-Germanism and left 
us free to live and work and trade 
in a world no longer unfriendly.*' 

This war is an enormous process 
of civilization, and it is as a process 
that we should look at it — a pro- 
cess that came inevitably out of 



122 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK 

the preparations made for it and 
the defects in the world-arrange- 
ment that preceded it. We ought 
to feel confident that out of all 
the killing and destruction that is 
going on, ideas and considerations 
and concessions will come to birth 
that will be worth the terrible cost 
and anguish of the accouchement. 
There is a German point of view 
that, with all its unconscionable 
terrors and brutalities and its 
dreadful entanglement with mili- 
tarism and the gospel of force and 
Prussian Junkerism, is not all non- 
sense. These Germans that are 
being killed by regiments ought 
to be carrying their civilization to 
the parts of the world that need it, 
As far as it goes, it is a wonderful 



UNSCRAMBLING OF EUROPE 123, 

civilization, and the made-over 
world that is coming must provide 
markets for all that is good in it. 
For that matter, the world that 
was before the first of August was 
open enough, amply open, to the 
German civilization. It was only 
closed to German sovereignty, 
which could not spread except b}^ 
trespassing on premises already in 
hands competent to resist tres- 
pass. German civilization was wel- 
come almost everywhere. German 
sovereignty was welcome almost 
nowhere outside of Germany. 
That it will be any more welcome 
after the war does not seem at all 
likely, but with the fear of Ger- 
man sovereignty dissipated, Ger- 
man civilization — meaning effi- 



124 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK 

ciency, patience, and order — may 
be more welcome in the earth than 
ever. 

Meanwhile it is all the prelimi- 
nary details of the process that 
interest us; the details of the 
fighting. That goes on at this 
writing on the line of the Aisne 
with desperate fervency. The 
Allies refuse to be beaten; so do 
the Germans. The butcher's bill 
grows and grows; we know little 
about it, and cannot think much 
about it yet, because of the inten- 
sity of our concern about the issue. 
Clearly, the great plan to over- 
whelm France by a sudden on- 
slaught is a failure. If the invad- 
ers are to possess France they will 



UNSCRAMBLING OF EUROPE 125 

have to earn and pay for every 
yard of it. But there is no pros- 
pect that they will possess it. 
The Germans on the Aisne are 
fighting for dear life, and all the 
time the rapping on the back doors 
of Berlin grows louder, and winter 
is coming on. Terrible stories 
come and persist about German 
atrocities in Belgium, including out- 
rage and mutilation of women. A 
letter published in the Sun, written 
to Harold M. Sewall, of Bath, 
Maine, is explicit and convincing 
as to this latter point. This 
dreadful development of morbid 
brutishness is perhaps a detail of 
the furor Teutonicus against which 
Professor Ernst Richard so lately 
warned the world. It must make 



126 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK 

direful reading for the German 
apologists. 

The more thoughtful people 
have had no real vacation this 
year. August is the vacation 
month, and since August first we 
have all been to school every day, 
Sundays included, learning the 
military art and the history and 
geography of Europe. Among 
other things, we have fought over 
again the chief battles of our own 
Civil War for our better under- 
standing of the proceedings in 
France. There has been no peace, 
no rest. Where we have not been 
harrowed by enormous battles, vast 
destruction, and huge mortality, 
we have been ruminating about the 



UNSCRAMBLING OF EUROPE 127 

immediate future of mankind. It 
is as though all bets were declared 
off and all precedents became in- 
valid on August first, and a new 
time began on that date, to which 
the calculations that had come to 
be our habit no longer applied. 
The jar of this transition is enor- 
mous, even here, where we are 
shielded by distance from the 
griefs and material distress that 
accompany it. Our friends are 
not dead, nor in special peril; 
no consuming disaster hangs over 
us, and yet most of us Americans 
are depressed, some consciously, 
some without knowing why. You 
can't read war and think war all 
the time for two months without 
feeling the strain of it. 



128 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK 

No; thoughtful people this 
year got only so much real vaca- 
tion as they had in June and 

July. 



LET US TURN OUT OUR POCKETS 

WE ought to get into this 
European war harder. 
Since it is not proposed 
that we shall fight in it, we ought 
to get into the rescue work with 
more power. Some of us are doing 
something, but most of us are 
doing nothing and not enough is 
being done. Not enough money 
is coming out for the Belgians, 
whose terrible plight is so pro- 
foundly appealing. Not enough 
for the Red Cross. One trouble is 
that we have war troubles of our 
own; that because of upsets, due 

9 129 



130 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK 

to war, in many lines of business, 
an unusual proportion of our own 
people are in more or less pecu- 
niary distress. Another trouble is 
that when six nations in Europe 
are spending their utmost energies 
to kill, what even a large country, 
three thousand miles away, can do 
to save must seem almost trivial. 
Still, we ought to do more; we 
must do more. No other invest- 
ment offers such returns as the 
succor of the Belgians, so many of 
whom, woeful to tell, are beyond 
aid already. 

Come, brethren, let us turn out 
our pockets at least. The special 
appeal now to us is for the Bel- 
gians and the French of Northern 
France; the regions where the war 



TURN OUT OUR POCKETS 131 

has gone. What terrible cries will 
come later and from where no one 
can tell. In Austria there must 
be great distress, but Austria and 
East Prussia and Poland are not 
so near our door as Belgium is. 
The only safe place for Belgian 
non-combatants now seems to be 
England, and there they have gone 
by thousands and are being cared 
for by the English. 

No doubt our great part in this 
vast disturbance is to mind our 
own business and keep our general 
apparatus of production and dis- 
tribution going for the benefit 
not only of ourselves, but of all 
Europe. But though to mind our 
jobs is useful, it does not ease 
our hearts much. Lucky anybody 



132 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK 

who can go over there and help. 
Lucky anybody who has much to 
give and gives it. Those who have 
not much to give should pinch 
and give more than they can. 
That is better than to be left out 
of this war. It is not brotherly to 
stay out. 

The interminable battle on the 
Aisne still, at this writing, rages 
on indecisively, apparently with 
enormous loss of life. We are told 
now to call it, not a battle, but a 
campaign. Other huge campaigns 
are going on to the east of Ger- 
many, where the Russians seem to 
have the better of it, and where 
also enormous losses attest the ef- 
ficiency of modern war machines. 



TURN OUT OUR POCKETS 133 

It makes for detachment from 
life to watch these tremendous 
proceedings. It seems ignoble, 
and it is, to cling over anxiously 
to life when daily so many thou- 
sands before our eyes give it up. 
This is our battle, too, that is 
being fought in Europe; our des- 
tiny as well as their own that Bel- 
gians, British, French, Germans, 
and all the rest are struggling and 
dying over. This is a conflict of 
fundamental ideas. If the Ger- 
man idea wins, its next great 
clash seems likely to be with the 
idea that underlies such civiliza- 
tion as we have in these States. 
In some ways we are slack, and it 
might not be altogether bad for us 
to have the German goad scar our 



134 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK 

easy-setting hides. Read how the 
German peril has turned EngHsh 
Aldershot into a factory for turn- 
ing soft islanders into athletes. 
A very efficient instrument is 
the German goad, and wonderful 
things it seems to have done for 
Germany. There is a large pro- 
portion of unused energy in most 
people; the use of the German 
goad is to bring it all to applica- 
tion. Nature's goad is hunger, but 
that is not enough to carry civili- 
zation very far. The German 
goad undertakes to cover the 
whole distance that civilization has 
to go; to prod the whole world 
into a huge productiveness and all 
surviving mankind into fabulous 
efficiency. That is the idea that 



TURN OUT OUR POCKETS 135 

is now being discussed in Europe. 
It has come to the point where 
the nations have to settle whether 
they will accept the German idea 
and try to be like Germany, or 
reject it and demonstrate that it 
is unsound. 

What is the matter with it? It 
looks lovely to the Germans, and 
in great measure it has agreed with 
them wonderfully. They tell 3^ou 
that the army and military train- 
ing is the very hub of their wheel ; 
that it has made Germany what 
she is ; that it is the greatest thing 
in the world, and that to force it on 
the world is to confer on the world 
the greatest possible blessing. 

Well, Germany has conferred 



136 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK 

this blessing very considerably on 
Europe in the last forty years, and 
Europe in her deep perversity 
declines to like it. She wants to 
be rid of it. Perhaps she doubts 
that military training is the great- 
est thing in the world. There 
have been folks who said that love 
was. Germany has not bothered 
much with love, but she is undeni- 
ably strong in military training. 
There is so much good in the 
German discipline that people were 
almost ready to believe it was all 
good. Since the war came that 
inclination has weakened. The in- 
vasion of Belgium weakened it; 
so did Louvain; so did Rheims; so 
did the terrible harrying of the 
Belgians; so did the unanimity 



TURN OUT OUR POCKETS 137 

with which nearly all of Europe 
and the United States have taken, 
some actively, some as neutrals, 
the negative side in the argument. 
The feeling grows that the German 
idea, with all its immense good, 
makes for mania, and would ulti- 
mately, if it ran on, produce a 
crazy world, bereft of its jewels, 
with battles forever running in 
its head, and huge wars forever 
in preparation. So the discus- 
sion runs very high. When it is 
over the question will come up 
what to substitute for the German 
idea that will possess the valuable 
disciplinary facilities of that sys- 
tem without its dangerous ten- 
dency to produce military mania. 
After all, efficiency isn't every- 



138 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK 

thing. It isn't the chief end of 
man, nor even his main business 
on earth. His main business on 
earth is to live, except when, on 
occasion, as now, the main busi- 
ness of very many men becomes, 
temporarily, to die. 



GERMAN "KULTUR** AND THE 
PRUSSIAN IDEA 



GERMANY'S purpose in 
the great war, as seen 
from here, is to teach 
a reluctant world that what the 
German Kaiser says goes. It is 
a war for the vindication of the 
Prussian say-so; a war of destruc- 
tion and extermination of what- 
ever stands up against Prussian 
domination; a war to parcel out 
the world anew, and give Prussia 
what she wants. Prussia has 
dominated the rest of Germany so 
completely that it has forgotten 
139 



140 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK 

that there ever were ideas in Ger- 
many that were not Prussian. 
Undoubtedly Prussia is eager to 
dominate the rest of mankind in 
the same way, and morally cap- 
able of using any available means 
to do it. With the Prussian idea 
it is truly a case of world-power or 
downfall. It is an idea that is 
incapable of repose, that requires 
periodical exercise in the field, 
and must be fed on conquest if it 
is to keep its strength. 

That is not at all true of German 
^'kultur, " which we have so much 
been told the Germans are fight- 
ing to defend. The German 
"kultur" means pig-iron, Krupps, 
ships, beer, chemicals, music, 
discipline, military service, and 



''KULTUR'' AND PRUSSIA 141 

professors. It is the German 
civilization and includes the Ger- 
man attempt to discover, assimi- 
late, and apply knowledge and 
truth. This last needs very little 
defense by armies. It only needs 
time and peace. Given those, it 
will conquer the world, if it is good 
enough, and not a gun fired. 
Knowledge and truth are things 
for which, even in this world, 
there is plenty of room. Of habit- 
able land there is only a limited 
area on this planet; good ports are 
scarce; all the ready-made farm- 
ing land in the better climates 
belongs to somebody capable of 
making trouble if ousted, but 
the more truth people get hold of, 
the more there is left; the more 



142 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK 

knowledge is applied, the more 
awaits application. In so far as 
German ''kultur" was good, it had 
all the world to dominate, and no 
objection. In thirty years that 
domination had made vast pro- 
gress. But against the domina- 
tion of the Prussian idea the 
objection is so vital and intense 
that in the great world-rising 
against it there is only too much 
prospect that the breath of Ger- 
man **kultur" will be clean 
squeezed out of the German 
body. Krupps cannot do much 
for it; destruction and exter- 
mination — the erasure of beauty, 
the expulsion of piety — are not 
aids to it. It should be the ally 
of those things, not their foe. 



''KULTUR'' AND PRUSSIA 143 

Alas, then, for German "kultur, " 
ridden to its death by the ruthless 
Prussian demon; struggling splen- 
didly to do the demon's work, but 
fated, who can doubt, to sink in 
due time, gasping and bleeding, 
foundered by that fatal rider. The 
pity of it; oh, the pity of it! that 
what should be the world's ex- 
ample must figure as its warning; 
that this hell that is heating for 
the Saxons and Bavarians — kindly 
people both — is the kind of hell 
that awaits all people who fail 
to fight off Prussian domination 
before it has enchained them. It 
is a bad hell ; a hell of Krupps and 
ruined cities and violated women, 
and tears and misery and blood, 
and blackened fanes. 



144 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK 

Since Antwerp fell it has seemed 
more than ever that this world 
is not our home, and the war seems 
more than ever like a war of Rome 
and Carthage. For the capture of 
Antwerp seems a blow at England. 
We were pretty sure all along that 
the Germans could beat up the 
Belgians if they put their minds on 
it, but it was hoped that England 
and France between them could 
furnish distraction enough to keep 
them diverted. But that has not 
proved feasible, and now it seems 
a longer road than ever to Tip- 
perary. 

The improved Krupp siege-guns 
seem to have made all exposed 
fortifications obsolete. We have 
been building some defenses lately 



''KULTUR'' AND PRUSSIA 145 

to protect the Panama Canal. It 
will be interesting to know if they 
would be of any use against these 
new Krupps. Fortifications are 
expensive and take up room, and 
perhaps it is something to be put 
to the credit of the big Krupps 
and the Zeppelins that they have 
destroyed the efficiency of forts. 
If there is to be no security in 
fortifications, folks who hope to 
live in the enjoyment of liberty and 
die in their beds must contrive 
new means of protection. The 
peace of the world must rest on 
some new understanding, ade- 
quately enforced, or perhaps we 
must just resign ourselves to tak- 
ing bigger chances. It was a bene- 
fit to the world and helped the 



146 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK 

general cause of democracy when 
the early improvements in cannon 
put old-time city walls out of use. 
City dwellers have had more room 
ever since, and trade has been 
freer. Like advantages may 
come in the end out of the current 
improvements in war which have 
made it too efficient. When all 
modern knowledge and all the re- 
sources of modern industry are 
concentrated on the work of killing 
men by wholesale and destroying 
all their works, a degree of success 
IS attained which is self-decapitat- 
ing. Questions like this current 
one, whether the Prussian Idea is 
the Only Hope and the Kaiser 
the Preferred Instrument of the 
Almighty, are, of course, very 



''KULTUR'' AND PRUSSIA 147 

interesting indeed to discuss, but 
even to the Prussians themselves 
the discussion will seem too dear if 
the price of it is extermination. 

We do not realize this war, we 
Americans. The people who re- 
alize it most, as yet, are the Bel- 
gians, but all the countries actively 
concerned in it will realize in due 
time what it means when the 
resources of a mechanical civili- 
zation are concentrated on the 
destruction of human life. As for 
Belgium, she is like a country 
crucified for the saving of the 
nations. Of all the countries in- 
volved in the war, she was the 
most innocent, the best justified, 
the most gallant. Gashed with 



148 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK 

innumerable wounds, her poor 
body is a witness, still living, 
against the aggressions of Prussia, 
and against our modern warfare 
by machinery. 

There comes in the papers an 
echo of complaint from England, 
alleging that negotiations are 
making here to stop the war, and 
protesting that the war cannot be 
stopped until it reaches its natural 
finish. As to negotiations we 
know nothing, and our newspapers 
have reported nothing. But it is 
true enough that the war cannot 
be lanced until it comes to a head. 

There are two ways in which the 
Prussian idea of world-domination 
may achieve its fate; one is to be 
beaten now from the outside; the 



''KULTUR'' AND PRUSSIA 149 

Other is to succeed now and be 
overthrown in due time from with- 
in. But, either way, it is a very- 
important idea that will consider- 
ably change the world; and cer- 
tainly if it crashes down in ruin 
now, all the other ideas of world- 
domination by a single empire, 
British, Russian, American or any 
other, will go with it. When 
the London Stock Exchange opens 
again for business it is likely to 
open on a world chastened into 
considerable respect for the text 
that embellishes the Exchange 
front: ''The Earth is the Lord's 
and the fulness thereof." 



DR. MUNSTERBERG's APPEAL 

ONE may open Professor 
Munsterberg's book, ''The 
War and America,'* to 
scoff and close it to pray. There 
is little in it to change the opinions 
of Americans about the war, but 
there is a good deal that appeals 
to sympathy. Dr. Munsterberg's 
position is trying. He is a friend 
of this country, has cast in his lot 
with it, or, at least, is doing his 
life's work here, has been, he says, 
its defender against foolish detrac- 
tion abroad, has been a representa- 
tive of America among Germans, 
150 



DR. MUNSTERBERG'S APPEAL 151 

as also a representative of Ger- 
many among Americans. Now he 
is shocked and grieved when the 
country of his birth gets into a 
war with most of Europe to find 
American sentiment against Ger- 
many in overwhelming measure. 
He cannot understand it. He 
thinks there must be some mis- 
take; that we don't understand 
Germany and her position; don't 
know how good the Germans are, 
how important to the world, how 
imperiled by the jealousy of Eng- 
land, the unaccommodating spirit 
of Belgium, the revengefulness of 
France, and the dark malice of 
Russia. How can we see these 
valuable and persistently peace- 
seeking people so atrociously as- 



152 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK 

sailed and not be for them! Did 
not gallant old Steuben fight for 
us — better than Lafayette did — in 
the Revolution? Did not Ger- 
mans in considerable numbers fight 
for the Union in the Civil War? 
Is not nearly a quarter of our 
population of the German stock? 
At least we should be neutral — 
neutral in our feelings as well as 
in the actions of our government. 
Family ties, trade relations, art 
and science, respect and good- 
will had bound the United States 
and Germany and Austria closely 
together. "To-day,'* says Dr. 
Munsterberg, "one surging wave 
of hatred has swept it all away." 
' ' Hatred ? ' ' Herr Professor ; 
hatred? Must the judge hate the 



DR. MUNSTERBERCS APPEAL 153 

plantiff when he gives judgment 
for the defendant? ''I have 
repeated incessantly," you write, 
' ' that the desire for fairness is one 
of the deepest traits in the Ameri- 
can mind. Must I reverse all my 
enthusiasm and my faith?" 

No, don't reverse yet. See this 
misery through and watch how we 
behave. We are not necessarily 
unfair because the Franco-Bel- 
gian-British end of this trouble 
looks better to us than the German 
end. Maybe that end is the best. 
You admire our propensity to be 
fair, but the minute we incline 
against the German side in a great 
dispute you impugn our judicial 
capacity. 

Never mind ! Everything should 



154 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK 

be excused to you because you are 
a suffering man, trying to make 
a bad case look good. No doubt 
it is impossible that you should see 
this case as we see it. Your book 
must convince any un-German 
reader that we shall never see the 
case as you see it. The idea which 
you offer of simple, honest Ger- 
many taking a few indispensable 
military precautions against the 
ravening wolves of Europe, and 
especially against the impending 
hug of the terrible bear, is comic 
to us, Herr Doctor. We can't 
help it. With all due respect, we 
remember Frederick William and 
his tall grenadiers, Frederick the 
Great and Alaria Theresa, Bis- 
marck's Prussia and Austria in '66, 



DR. MUNSTERBERG'S APPEAL 155 

and then what you call "the war 
of 1870 recklessly stirred by the 
intolerance of Imperial France," 
and since 1888 the Kaiser and 
his Krupps, and we smile, Herr 
Doctor; we just have to. 

Blood and iron is a great medi- 
cine, but Germany, as we see it, 
has overdosed herself with it. She 
has not made a friend in Europe 
since Bismarck died. They say 
he was overruled when x\lsace and 
Lorraine were detached from 
France. They tell us the Kaiser 
was tricked into this war by the 
Prussian war-hogs. Alas, Pro- 
fessor Miinsterberg, it is not the 
Americans who are the enemies of 
Germany. You will find in due 
time that they do not hate the 



156 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK 

good Germans. The enemies of 
Germany have been men of her 
own household, the men who have 
not only dreamed, but published 
to the world what you scornfully 
describe as "the fantastic dreams 
of the so-called Pan-Germans." 
Why, since 1870, has Germany 
confidently expected another great 
war? Why has she ceaselessly 
trained men, built fortresses, cast 
guns, hoarded money and organ- 
ized to the last detail a campaign 
against the rest of Europe? The 
reason, as we see it, is that the 
small class that guides the destinies 
of her industrious millions has had 
*'God with Us" for its motto and 
''Rule or Ruin" for its policy. 
Germany is a great country gone 



DR. MUNSTERBERCS APPEAL 157 

wrong. She is getting what her 
rulers have earned for her. They 
have made her an impossible 
nation; a menace to mankind. 
She has put her trust in force, 
alienated her natural allies, dis- 
honored her treaties. Now her 
appeal to force has gone to judg- 
ment. If she conquers Europe 
ruin will find her in victory as it 
found Napoleon. If Europe con- 
quers her she will get off easier; 
but either way she has terrible 
sorrows ahead of her and is a fit 
object of pity for all kind people. 



A LITTLE MORE ARMAMENT FOR 
UNCLE SAM! 

WE saw the German army 
march to Paris. We saw 
Liege fall, and since then 
we have watched the capture of 
Antwerp. We have stood by 
attentive while German submar- 
ines have sunk five British cruisers. 
We have also seen the German 
attacking force driven back from 
the Marne to the Aisne by the 
French and British forces, and 
German commerce chased from 
the seas by the British navy. We 
have been duly attentive to all 
158 



AMERICA NEEDS ARMAMENT 159 

these spectacles, and unless we are 
very, very stupid, we must have 
acquired some new and definite 
realizations about modern war. 
Chief among them may well be 
the conviction that if we were to 
choose from the animal kingdom 
the creature that best exemplifies 
our relative condition among 
powerful nations, we would have 
to remove our good old eagle 
from our country's seal and coins 
and substitute for him the soft- 
shell crab. 

Considering what we are and 
what we have got, we are, next to 
China, the most defenseless con- 
siderable people on the crust. 
Only our modest navy im.pairs our 
claim to be the Pie of the Nations. 



i6o THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK 

To be siire, we are too big to be 
conquered by any sudden dash, 
and have in us, besides, enormovis 
potentiaHties of defense or agres- 
sion. To be sure, too, we are so 
pacific and so little ambitious to 
take anything from anybody, and 
so isolated that we can safely go 
much lighter armed and less pro- 
tected than any other great country. 
But we seem to have leaned too 
hard on isolation and our pacific 
reputation. This war that we 
have been watching has shown us 
that our coast defenses are pro- 
bably out of date; that, in pro- 
portion to our responsibilities, our 
navy is small and insufficiently 
equipped, and that our little skele- 
ton army needs more meat on its 



AMERICA NEEDS ARMAMENT i6i 

poor bones. Everyone who is in- 
terested in our equipment for war 
knows that it is conspicuously 
incomplete. No one knows it 
better than Europe and Japan. 
Mexico at our back door is a big 
bundle of disorders and anxieties. 
Our temporary tenure of Vera Cruz 
was threatened last week by some 
uneasy Mexican bandit, and may 
be threatened again to-morrow. 
What our duty to Mexico may 
come to be we do not know, but 
if our hopes should be disappointed 
and we should yet have to inter- 
vene, our whole military force in 
being would not be enough for the 
job. 

We are pacific, but we under- 



i62 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK 

take some duties which imply 
maintenance of a moderately com- 
petent apparatus of force. The 
Monroe Doctrine, that is part of 
our accepted foreign poHcy, is 
maintained not so much by us 
as by the navy of England. We 
see Germany, her vast efficiency in 
military matters, and the curious 
obsessions and aspirations to 
which the minds that control her 
are subject. We know that Ger- 
many has yearnings that conflict 
with our continental policy, and 
that what chiefly stands between 
them and us is England, now 
fighting for her life. We don't 
think England will be conquered, 
but if she should be, what have 
we got to back up such an answer 



A M ERIC A NEEDS A RMA MENT 1 63 

as we should wish to make to a 
proposal from Germany that she 
should be allowed to improve the 
culture of Mexico or South Brazil? 
And there is Japan, whom we love 
considerably, and who, we doubt 
not, is fond of us, but who will 
think no less kindly of us for hav- 
ing due shot in our lockers, and 
being not only polite and consider- 
ate, but able-bodied. 

Are we not rather too short of 
munitions of war? Recent events 
have demonstrated that we are 
living on the same planet with 
nations whose supreme desire is 
to knock the heads off of one 
another, and who, just now, have 
subverted all their other business 



164 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK 

to the accomplishment of that pur- 
pose. 'V^^at this world will be like, 
or who will be boss in it, when 
present activities terminate, we 
cannot guess. What aims the 
conquerors will have or what 
means to accomplish them we 
cannot tell, but in a world so mad 
as this, plunging to conditions 
which cannot be foreseen, would 
it not be wise for us to add a 
little to our means of self-pro- 
tection? 

It takes three years to build a 
battleship. They say it takes a 
year to make a torpedo. It takes 
six months, at least, to make even 
an experimental soldier, and very 
much longer to make even an 
experimental sailor. We do not 



AMERICA NEEDS ARMAMENT 165 

want to be a military nation, but 
we should not be too slack about 
military prepartion. Had we not 
better take, quietly but promptly, 
our little dose of the medicine 
which is being passed out in such 
vast quantities to Europe? Our 
situation has changed violently in 
three months. We ought to do 
something about it, and do it at 
once. The time is at hand when 
we shall have to take care of our- 
selves and may be called upon to 
protect some of our neighbors. 
Should we not qualify ourselves 
betimes for these duties? We are 
having a tremendous lesson in 
human history, from which, for 
us, one application is: In time 
of war prepare for peace ! 



1 66 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK 

One alternative to employing 
some more troops and providing 
for annual provision of a moder- 
ate reserve of trained soldiers, 
and building a supply of torpe- 
does, submarines, and junk of that 
sort, and putting a rather larger 
share of the national mind and 
money into military and naval pro- 
vision, would be to come out for 
non-resistance. Bishop Greer has 
done that. To the average un- 
regenerate mind it does not look 
like a good course. But it looks 
about as good and quite as hope- 
ful as this other method that is 
now proceeding in Eiirope. To 
be between excessive armament 
and non-resistance is to be between 
the devil and the deep sea, and 



AMERICA NEEDS ARMAMENT 167 

after all, drowning is a compara- 
tively easy death. 

What does anybody suppose 
Germany would do to the world if 
it sat down and let her have her 
way? The chances are that if all 
outside opposition were removed 
from her, the South Germans 
would presently get to work to 
rid themselves of the insufferable 
Prussian military caste, including 
every Hohenzollern who could be 
caught on his way to the tall 
timber. 

In the light of events in the last 
three months, the present united 
condition of Germany has come 
to look like a cruel union of the 
wolf and his prey. The great 
crime against Germany is not 



1 68 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK 

British jealousy, not French re- 
venge, nor Russian maHce. It is 
German governmental stupidity. 
Not since William II assisted Bis- 
marck down the German front 
steps with his boot, has Germany 
produced a man who had the nec- 
essary gumption 'to get anything 
from Europe, except with a blud- 
geon. The Kaiser is not so bad 
a man, but he is of second or third- 
rate ability, and he has managed 
to concentrate in his sacred per- 
son virtually all authority over 
the destinies of the German people. 
Of course, at times, democracy is 
heartrending, but it isn't so bad 
as a hereditary Kaiserism. 

Stars above! This spectacle of 
a great people befuddled and mis- 



A MERICA NEEDS A RMA MENT 1 69 

led in this century by one second- 
rate man, himself misled by a lot 
of bughouse militants whose trade 
is destruction ! It makes one want 
to go out and eat grass with the 
cows, like Nebuchadnezzar; to get 
in with the animals, of whom 

''Not one is dissatisfied, not one 
is demented with the mania for 
owning things," 

(especially colonies), and who, 
though at times they fight, fight 
merely with horns and teeth and 
claws, and not with the very lat- 
est thing in modern improved 
machinery. 

It all makes one half-ashamed 
to buy a gun or order a torpedo, 



170 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK 

though in our case, when we have 
done all that anyone as yet will 
dare propose, we shall have acquired 
no more than a fairly competent 
national police force. The world 
nowadays, under the great stimu- 
lation of German militarism, is, 
like a city infested with gangs, 
where all the available money is 
spent in strengthening the gangs, 
and nothing for the police. Only 
in so far as our war-money is spent 
on something that will keep order 
in the world, will there be satis- 
faction in spending it. And per- 
haps it will be so spent, for if the 
warring gangs fight one another to 
a standstill and call for the police, 
it is we most of all who should be 
ready to respond. 



GERMANY, THE DOCTOR 

THERE is no doubt about 
the efficiency of the great 
current German advertise- 
ment. Our German friends may 
give themselves all credit. They 
have done the trick as it has never 
been done before. Everywhere 
their notice has taken the head of 
the column, and reading matter is 
lucky if it can squeeze in next to it. 
Up to the first of August Germany, 
as we saw it, was a country in 
Europe somewhere between France 
and Russia, that printed in an 

old-fashioned, middle-age type, 
171 



172 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK 

was good in music, beer, shipping, 
and manufactures, and rather 
bumptious in international politics. 
German history was so mixed up 
that only the more proficient 
students got far into it. German 
baths were good; so were German 
razors. The Germans were the 
best chemists, and made excellent 
toys. We knew them as efficient 
people; traded with them exten- 
sively; welcomed them here as 
visitors or settlers; but about the 
German mind and what was going 
on in it, very few of us had much 
knowledge or felt any particular 
concern. 

But since the fourth of August, 
when the Germans began to pub- 
lish their advertisement across the 



GERMANY, THE DOCTOR 173 

line in Belgium, all that has 
changed. To all thinking people 
in the world, the compelling and 
engrossing thought has become 
Germany. What is she? How 
came she so? What does she 
want, and can she get it? Those 
have become the rtiling subjects 
of enquiry, and enquirers have 
tackled them on the run. The one 
thing needful has seemed to be 
to understand Germany. Every- 
thing about her has assumed a vast 
importance — her place on the 
map, her history for ten centuries, 
her religions, her ambitions, her 
hatreds and the sources of them 
and, of course, her military and 
naval apparatus. We are all in 
the situation of the fisherman 



174 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK 

when he had let the genie out of the 
bottle. We don't know what we 
have got, but we see that it is 
a mighty big thing, and want to 
know about it. We want to know, 
especially, what it is going to do 
to us. 

Already it has done a lot. Peo- 
ple used to laugh about the Belgian 
lion, especially the one on the 
monument at Waterloo. It may 
be that the careless morals of the 
late Leopold impaired the dignity 
of Belgium's reputation. At any 
rate, most people thought rather of 
her thrift than of her punch. But 
over her line drives Germany, and 
behold Belgiiun the wild-cat; Bel- 
gium who dared the Minotaur; 



GERMANY, THE DOCTOR 175 

Belgium, the savior of France, the 
defense of England, the pepper in 
the monster's eye, the hero, the 
martyr! Never such a splendor of 
glory and of sympathy — and, alas! 
punishment — as the great German 
advertisement has brought to little 
Belgium. 

And France, whose vice has 
been thrift, behold her a spend- 
thrift of all things precious! 
Emotional France! See her calm, 
determined, prompt; well ordered, 
well generaled; matching strength 
with strength, prodigal in devo- 
tion, intelligent in sacrifice. 

There is a new England. Lloyd 
George tells how "A great flood of 
luxury and sloth which had sub- 
merged the land is receding and 



176 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK 

a new Britain is appearing" that 
"can see for the first time the 
fundamental things that matter 
in Hfe and that have been obscured 
... by the tropical growth of 
prosperity." 

Very wonderful, all this. Ger- 
many is the great doctor of Europe. 
Played-out men and women have 
been going to her to be cured for 
generations. Now she is bringing 
her cure to those who stayed at 
home. 

Oh, the amazing Germany! she 
that practically single-handed has 
served notice on Europe: ''Obey or 
fight for freedom!" How came it 
to be in her? Out of what far-off 
springs, what inward strivings, 



GERMANY, THE DOCTOR 177 

what leadings, what visions and 
hallucinations has come to her this 
extraordinary call to be the purge 
of a commercialized civilization! 
How came it that the Germans, a 
people mostly simple, kindly, and 
affectionate, should suddenly tran- 
spire as "the stern hand of fate to 
scourge us to an elevation where 
we can see the everlasting things 
that matter for a nation?" 

We want to know; we want to 
understand. Everything about 
Germany has become vitally inter- 
esting. We examine her on the 
map. We seize on the books that 
tell her symptoms and the history 
of her case. We cannot read Von 
Treitschke, but we read about him; 
and we read Nietzsche and Bern- 



178 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK 

hardi and Usher and Cramb and 
many more. In Germans, German- 
born or American-born, we have 
a new interest. Three months 
ago we gave them no special 
thought. Now we look at each 
of them curiously, trying to see in 
them some trace of this prodigious 
insanity that has shaken the world. 
When the French went mad and 
purged Europe they had a great 
leader. But the Germans have 
no great leader. They have a 
sublime delusion and a magnifi- 
cent machine. Their leaders, it 
would seem, are Von Treitschke 
and Nietzsche, both dead. Their 
Kaiser is a gallant but not a wise 
man; their whole leadership, spir- 
itual and political, seems touched 



GERMANY, THE DOCTOR 179 

with madness and inevitably des- 
tined to disaster. But, oh, the 
marvel and the splendor of it! 
And, oh, the immense effect of it 
on a machine-crazed world — slack 
in faith, greedy of ease, and filled 
with people jealous of the means 
and easements of their neighbors! 



THINKING LIKE A GERMAN 

IT is related that Captain Disco 
Troop, who went out of 
Gloucester to the Banks, 
could think like a cod, and did so 
think when he was after cod, and 
so filled his schooner and got home 
before his brethren. 

We in this country are not yet 
out after Germans, but we are 
closely concerned with them and 
mightily concerned about them, 
and it seems very important that 
we should learn to think like a 
German. For three months now 

a great many of us have been 
1 80 



THINKING LIKE A GERMAN i8i 

trying to do it, with such assist- 
ance as we could get from available 
authorities on German thought, 
and from an exceedingly stimu- 
lating spectacle of German action. 
We have read the newspapers, 
including great numbers of letters- 
to-the-editor, both from Germans 
and anti-Germans, statements 
from all kinds of professors, reports 
from returning travelers, appeals 
in great number from professional 
writers, and "white papers" and 
government manifestoes. We 
have read the English reviews, 
our own magazines and reviews, 
and books or extracts from books 
by Bernhardi, Treitschke, Usher, 
Cramb, Wile, Biilow, and the rest. 
From these researches, coupled 



1 82 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK 

with our observation of ciirrent 
events reflected with more or less 
distortion, most of us have con- 
cluded that Germans think steadily 
the will-to-power, conceiving of 
the world as their lawful apple, 
from eating which they have been 
far too long restrained by the 
rest of mankind, and especially 
by England. We think we think 
like a German when we think 
Kaiserism, Prussianism, the rule 
of might, blood, and iron, Deutsche 
land fiber Alles, Force the higher 
law, and all that. Accordingly, 
it is getting to be that every 
German is suspect. Three months 
ago we thought of Germans not 
very often, being concerned with 
baseball, woman suffrage, our 



THINKING LIKE A GERMAN 183 

home-grown politics, the refor- 
mation of society, the efforts of the 
Alexander Berkman crowd to con- 
fer moral importance on disorder, 
the efforts to expel the bad germs 
from business, the vivisection of 
the railroads, the chastening of 
the express companies, and Becky 
Edelson's disinclination to eat in 
jail. When we did think of Ger- 
mans we thought of them respect- 
fully and kindly, and with the sen- 
timent that it was foolish of the 
abstinence party people to inter- 
vene between them and beer. But 
since August ist all these other 
topics have been virtually wiped 
off the slate, and we think, most of 
the time, about Germans, and think 
like a German in so far as we can. 



1 84 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK 

Are we doing it? Are we really 
thinking like a German when 
we think the Germans are out 
to capture the earth? Are we 
justified in thinking of all the 
Germans, here and everywhere, 
as for Germany against the world? 
Must we think of Herman Ridder 
for example, as awaiting, with a 
concrete howitzer base in his back 
garden, the coming of the Krupps 
to the Western Hemisphere? Are 
our neighbors here of German 
derivation potential spies of the 
Kaiser and potential allies of the 
Kaiserland against this Republic 
that has sheltered them? Ger- 
many in this war is, apparently, a 
very compact, united nation. In 
action all the Germans are work- 



THINKING LIKE A GERMAN 185 

ing in unison, fighting, paying, 
dying, shoulder to shoulder; are 
we to infer that in every German 
mind exists this strenuous pur- 
pose, avowed by one great school 
of German thought and finding its 
due expression in a war defended 
or extenuated by all the rest — the 
purpose to impose on earth the 
Hohenzollern will as its dominant 
governmental force; to seize for 
Germany whatever Germans 
covet; to kill and destroy what- 
ever stands in the way of Ger- 
man ambition, humbling all 
other powers that Germany may 
increase? 

If to think these thoughts is 
to think like a German, then we 
Americans ought all to realize it. 



1 86 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK 

"Given that mood of mind," 
writes a friend to this paper, 
"victory for the Teuton would be 
more terrible than defeat, as the 
world would be delivered to a 
succession of barren struggles, 
ending in such suspicion and de- 
spair as creation has never wit- 
nessed. " How is it? How many 
German minds have yielded to 
this terrible obsession? How 
many of the German fighting men 
are consciously expressing it ? How 
many feel themselves committed 
to world-power or downfall? 

It is the habit of peoples, when 
involved in a serious war, to fight 
first and think afterwards. The 
trouble about thinking like the 



THINKING LIKE A GERMAN 187 

German masses is that there is no 
evidence that the German masses 
have yet begun to think. They 
are very busy fighting and taking 
care of wounded men, and a great 
many already are dead. Vor- 
waerts, the Social- Democrat Ger- 
man paper, showed signs of think- 
ing, and (we hear) was suppressed. 
The only German thought that 
shows just now is this Pan-Ger- 
man, world-power, Machtpolitik 
thought that has brought on and is 
conducting the war. The mass of 
Germans behaves as though it was 
completely penetrated and pos- 
sessed with this thought. If we 
are to think like a German it is 
the only important and effective 
thought available for us at present. 



i88 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK 

And yet, if we attribute it to all 
Germans, it may be we shall do 
them an injustice. It may be that 
they are already beginning to think 
thoughts of their own not identical 
with this governing thought of the 
Prussian force- worshippers, and 
that a little further along in the 
war, when the Russians, say, finally 
cross the German border, we shall 
begin to get a new line of Ger- 
man thought which is not de- 
rived from Treitschke and Bern- 
hardi, and, perhaps, is not strictly 
Hohenzollern. 

Let us wait a bit and see. The 
new thought, if it comes, may be 
very, very interesting and fruitful ; 
fruitful possibly of the sort of 
fruit that hangs from trees by 



THINKING LIKE A GERMAN 189 

hempen stems and is harvested in 
coffins. 

Let us wait. And especially let 
our brother Americans of German 
descent be advised to wait a little, 
too, and not be absolutely confi- 
dent that they are thinking like 
Germans until the whole of Ger- 
man thought has had a chance to 
disclose itself. 

The present leaders and direct- 
ors of German thought and action 
are the most important foes of 
democracy in the world. If our 
fellow-republicans here of German 
descent give the whole of their 
adherence to their present leaders, 
the later German sober second 
thought may terribly embarrass 
them. What will they say — 



I90 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK 

Ridder, Munsterberg, the Roose- 
velt Exchange Professors and 
all the Kaiserbund — if German 
thought suddenly changes on 
them? Who will they speak for 
then? Not for the United States, 
certainly, for they don't now; and 
not for Germany if Germany 
sheds the Kaiser. 

We do not envy the gentlemen 
in this country who have got in 
with the Kaiser. If his tires go 
flat they will have a very long 
walk home. 

Assistant Secretary Roosevelt 
says we have not enough men in 
the Navy by eighteen thousand to 
man the ships we have in stock. 

Mr. Roosevelt wovild be obliged 



THINKING LIKE A GERMAN 191 

if Congress would authorize the 
Navy Department to recruit that 
number of men and add them to 
the force that the law at present 
allows. 

We believe Mr. Joseph H. 
Choate, lately ambassador, would 
back Mr. Roosevelt in this desire. 
In the introduction that he has 
contributed to Cramb's Germany 
and England Mr. Choate says : 

''What is going on now is a con- 
test for the empire of the world, 
and we have no use for empire. 
But if we really wish for peace 
against all hazards, we must ever 
strengthen our Navy and train 
every youth in the Republic, as he 
approaches manhood, to such an 
extent as shall qualify him to be 



192 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK 

converted into an efficient soldier 
at the shortest notice." 

Mr. Choate does not wish to 
bring on war, but to keep out of it. 
With armament it is as it is with 
drink and many other things. Too 
much is worse than none; enough 
is better than none. Germany's 
awful example of too much arma- 
ment will be used by the inconsid- 
erate to scare us out of having 
enough, but we must have an ade- 
quate minimum apparatus of pro- 
tection. 

After all, how little a conqueror 
can conquer! When forcible re- 
sistance is overcome he thinks he 
has won, but he has only begun. 
There may be, there usually is, 



THINKING LIKE A GERMAN 193 

defeat in triumph and triumph in 
defeat. The conqueror can kill 
the body; he can destroy cities; 
he can spread starvation, change 
boundaries and flags. But his 
missiles cannot kill the spirit. If 
a beaten race survives it remains a 
factor in life. If it is extermin- 
ated, the conquering nation can- 
not escape the reckoning for its 
cruelty. Its own spirit reflects its 
conduct, is maimed when it inflicts 
an unjust wound, is chained by the 
chains it fastens on its prisoners, is 
seared by its ferocities, blasted by 
its ambitions, blood-poisoned by 
its fury. 

And in the end, what lasts is 
ideas. The Jews have had no 

country for nearly two thousand 
13 



194 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK 

years, but they had an idea, and 
they have lasted and have pros- 
pered. The Greeks ended cen- 
turies ago as a poHtical power, but 
their ideas still influence man- 
kind enormously. The Romans 
were conquered and reconquered 
long since, but Roman law and the 
Roman character and some of the 
Roman ideas about political and 
colonial government and the regu- 
lation of life are still active factors 
in our world. It is important that 
order should be kept on this planet, 
but it is not so important who 
keeps it as people think. What is 
important is the ideas that de- 
velop when it gives them a chance. 



GERMANY AND COLONIES 

A MAN who returned a book 
by Nietzsche to the PubHc 
Library remarked as he 
passed it in: ''This does not get 
under my skin.** 

The remark applies to the efforts 
of the German apologists in this 
country. Some of these gentle- 
men have done better than others, 
but none of them has got under 
the American skin. Their best has 
been to bring some ideas and 
arguments to American attention 
that later on may help to inspire 
sentiments that may be useful 
195 



196 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK 

to Germany. A good many of us, 
for instance, think with sympathy 
of Germany's yearning for good 
colonial possessions, where Ger- 
mans may develop as Germans 
and the German language will not 
have to yield to English. That 
seems a natural aspiration for a 
crowded and energetic country, 
but while, in a way, we sym- 
pathize with it, we are not ready 
yet to help break up and make 
over the various continents in 
order to further it. No doubt we 
understand and like the English 
civilization better than the Ger- 
man because it is based in demo- 
cracy and is more like our own, 
but we are not finally committed 
to the idea that the English are the 



GERMANY AND COLONIES 197 

Chosen People and ought for the 
world's good to inherit the earth. 
We shotild be glad to have the 
Germans have greater territorial 
possessions if it could be accom- 
plished without intolerable disturb- 
ance and if the Germans showed 
any considerable qualifications 
for successful colonization. But 
nobody seems able to endure Ger- 
man rule but Germans. They can 
stand the German method when 
they have to. Other peoples hate 
it, and even Germans, once they 
have escaped it, stay away. 

It is related that when Dean 
Richmond was president of the 
New York Central Railroad some 
one said to him: "I see all your 
conductors have gold watches and 



198 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK 

diamond pins. Those men must 
be knocking down fares. I should 
think you'd discharge them." 
But Mr. Richmond said: "These 
present conductors have already 
provided themselves with dia- 
mond pins and gold watches. Do 
you really think we would do well 
to substitute for them a lot of new 
men with diamonds and watches 
still to get?" 

So, in spite of our sympathy 
with German desires, the profit to 
the world of having Germany 
supersede England as a colonial 
power seems very dubious. Eng- 
land has been greedy and is now 
pretty well glutted; she has been 
harsh and has grown almost gen- 
tle; her manners have been bad, 



GERMANY AND COLONIES 199 

but they have improved. In so 
far as she rules colonies now, she 
does it chiefly by persuasion. The 
thought of having Germany, the 
new broom, sweep through the 
continents, excites far more dis- 
may than enthusiasm. 

No doubt there should be organ- 
ized a great holding company to 
take title to the outlying portions 
of the earth, and give deserving 
peoples privileges of residence and 
exploitation in spare lands that 
would suit them. If there were 
such a holding company it may be 
that Germany would get good 
openings, for there are vast regions 
which her widely advertised 
Kultur might very much improve. 



200 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK 

Instead of which we see it now 
devoted to an appalling destruc- 
tion: sacrificing by the hundred 
thousand the lives of its own young 
men — very good young men, most 
of them — killing also by the hun- 
dred thousand the valuable and 
rather scarce young men of 
France and Belgium and England, 
and wasting in like manner the 
youth of illimitable Russia, who 
has room for them all, and involv- 
ing Austria and, one after another, 
the other outlying nations, in 
corresponding sacrifice and de- 
struction. 

It is bad, bad, bad ; and all grows 
out of the vice of nationality, 
which is so nearly a virtue and 
yet raises such particular hob. 



GERMANY AND COLONIES 201 

And here in these States all we 
seem able to do about it is to say 
how dreadful it is, and moan, and 
give something to a fund, and go 
home to dinner. How are we go- 
ing to get our medicine? How 
shall this enormous discipline the 
world is imdergoing be brought 
home to us to our spiritual profit? 

Of course we have been pinched 
in the general squeeze. A great 
deal of our business has had and is 
having a hard scramble to get 
along. The collapse of the cotton 
market is only one of many troubles 
growing out of the war which put 
people out of their habits of living, 
and involve loss of employment, 
and distress. The war does reach 



202 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK 

US and may yet pinch us hard 
enough to compel great co-oper- 
ative and perhaps governmental 
measures for relief at home as well 
as abroad. But it might, and 
^ay, go further than that as a 
disciplinary experience and yet 
not exceed our national needs. 
The seeds of it seem to be very 
deep. It is the culmination of 
a world-wide unrest, due to some- 
thing more than armament and 
the jealousies of nations, and felt 
in this country and China as 
distinctly as in the countries that 
are fighting. We of the United 
States have by no means escaped 
this general infection. We have 
had the suffrage agitation, the 
Progressive movement, such queer 



GERMANY AND COLONIES 203 

signs of uneasiness as last year's 
fashions and the tango, and an 
anti-capitalist revolution with in- 
dictments and a fight against the 
railroads and the trusts. England 
has like disquietudes or worse. 
France had its excitements, like 
the Caillaux case and a political 
deadlock. Conditions peculiar to 
Europe have made the disturbance 
over there culminate in this huge 
and deadly conflict of nations, out 
of which the survivors may hope to 
emerge cured of their insanities. 
But how are we to be cured of ours? 
Will the treatment we have had, 
joined to what we are getting as 
we sit here on the edge of the hurri- 
cane, be enough? Is there dis- 
cipline enough coming, joined to 



204 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK 

what we have had, to knock the 
nonsense out of us, too, and jolt 
us back into just relations with 
the realities of life? 

That is the nature of the ques- 
tion which many minds must be 
cogitating as we read of the Ger- 
mans crossing and recrossing the 
Yser on the bodies of their fellows. 
Tolstoi, in his curious forecast of 
world troubles at this time, saw 
them all proceed out of the "eternal 
courtesan, Commercialism.'* But 
that means the whole world- 
structure of money-making busi- 
ness, with its vast machinery of 
machines, factories, shops, banks; 
the whole apparatus of industrial- 
ism and finance. Against that 



GERMANY AND COLONIES 205 

there has been proceeding in this 
country a fight for fifteen years 
which has come to a point where 
the whole money-caste (so to 
speak) has been dislodged from 
political control, leaving the admin- 
istration of government for the 
most part in the hands of men who 
can prove an alibi when accused of 
being seen in the company of a 
dollar. As a result, a very large 
proportion of the experience, 
ability, and leadership of the 
country has become unavailable 
for the public service, and the 
difficulty and expense of command- 
ing a sufficient advertisement to 
capture the public fancy has made 
it hard to bring forward the best 
men from the residue. Neverthe- 



206 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK 

less, we get some of them — perhaps 
enough; and under Mr. Wilson's 
leadership we are getting along 
pretty well. But the great war 
has caught us in the middle of a 
big experiment, and if, as seems 
possible, we are called upon to be 
an example to the world and a life- 
preserver to the perishing, we 
shall have to make a monumental 
scramble to discharge the con- 
spicuous duties thrust upon us 
with the requisite energy and skill. 
The world seems to be getting into 
a condition which somebody will 
have to rise to, and nobody else 
appears of the requisite size to do 
it but ourselves. But size will not 
be enough unless we have also 
quality and to manifest that will 



GERMANY AND COLONIES 207 

call for a greater co-operation of 
the intelligence and vigor of the 
country than our political affairs 
have seen for a good while past. 
There is likely to be more for this 
country to do than to trade on the 
misfortunes of Europe, or even 
spend what it can spare in retail 
succoring. A huge effort to help 
may be required of us which will 
lift us out of the trough of selfish- 
ness as war is lifting the nations of 
Europe, and will compel such a use 
of all our resources and such a 
co-operation of all our abilities as 
shall really teach us what we are 
and can do if we have to try. 

Our immediate opportunity is to 
succor the distressed Bulgarians. 
No one is in a position to do that 



2o8 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK 

but ourselves. What we have 
done so far is but a drop in the 
bucket. The people at large have 
not yet got into this work, and 
until they do it will not be done 
in the measure that the emergency 
calls for. 



THE GERMAN IDEAL 

PROFESSOR Kuno Francke 
of Harvard is one of the 
more successful German 
apologists because he is intelligent 
and not overbearing. He comes, 
not from Prussia, like Dr. Miinster- 
berg, but from Schleswig-Hol- 
stein, and has apparently inherited 
amenities with his Danish deri- 
vation. In a recent speech in 
Boston he explains that while there 
is still work for freedom to do in 
Germany, "it cannot be said that 
freedom during the last generation 

14 209 



2IO THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK 

has been the great national need of 
Germany, or that it is any longer 
the ideal that inspires Germany's 
best men." It has not, he says, 
been replaced by militarism, nor 
is world-dominion the ideal of re- 
sponsible Germans. Their ideal is 
of national self -improvement and 
national efficiency. **To the Ger- 
man the State is a spiritual, col- 
lective personality leading a life 
of its own beyond the lives of 
individuals, and its aim is not the 
protection of the happiness of 
individuals, but the making of a 
nobler type of man and the achieve- 
ment of high excellence in all the 
departments of life. '* This is the 
Kaiser's ideal, too, and his glori- 
fication of his office *' makes him 



THE GERMAN IDEAL 211 

the incarnation of the active and 
disciplined Germany." 

We are all trying hard just now 
to understand the Germans, and 
these words of Dr. Francke are 
adapted to help us. Just now this 
German ideal has to be taken in 
association with about five million 
highly competent soldiers, all 
practicing to spread it, and a large 
supply of exceptionally efficient 
Krupp guns exploding to the same 
end. The association is a little 
trying to the ideal. Is that a mere 
misfortune, or do the Army and 
the ideal belong together? Is this 
German ideal necessarily tied up to 
militarism because it is necessarily 
hostile to the ideal of individual 
freedom that belongs to such 



212 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK 

nations as France, England, Bel- 
gium, and the United States? 

Nobody outside of Germany 
would object, it would seem, to 
Dr. Francke*s German ideal unless 
there is something in it that threat- 
ens the security of other nations. 

Is there something? 

Our ideal of individual freedom 
is vague, vulnerable, impracticable 
often, outrageous sometimes. A 
lot of bad government usually gets 
in with it. 

This German ideal is smooth, 
efficient, steady, powerful — until 
it blows up. 

Must it blow up? Does it carry 
in it the germs of certain destruc- 
tion? 

There is so much about it that 



THE GERMAN IDEAL 213 

is strange, almost incredible, to us. 
It is so old-time- Jewish in some 
things. The Kaiser seems to be 
to the Germans what Moses was 
to the Israelites — a go-between 
between them and God ; a leader, a 
master. All peoples, it seems, must 
start that way, gathering around a 
master whose will protects and 
directs them, but it is hard to think 
of the Germans as beginners. But 
as a great modern power they are 
beginners, and this system that 
they have endured has brought 
them along, in material things at 
least, very wonderfully. 

But has it been doing what Dr. 
Francke says its ideal calls for? 
Has it been making a nobler type 
of man? It has certainly achieved 



214 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK 

high excellence in many of the 
departments of life. But in all? 
No. Not in all. It is good in 
Krupps and chemistry, in manu- 
factures, in trade, in civic gov- 
ernment, in the regulation of life 
for the promotion of average com- 
fort. It is bad in art. It is not 
notable in the higher forms of 
literature. And as to the great 
point of making nobler types of 
men — has it done it? The Ger- 
mans are notably efficient, but are 
they creative, are they inventive, 
and are they nobler than other 
men? They have told us that 
democratic France was decadent; 
that democratic England was a 
pretense and an empty shell; that 
Russia was barbarous. They said 



THE GERMAN IDEAL 215 

nothing about Belgium. There 
ought to be a Nobel prize for 
nobility. If there were, would it 
go to Germany? One sees in 
Germany immense efficiency, cour- 
age, aggressiveness, capacity to 
suffer, but where, so far, has she 
been noble? 

In Belgium? At Louvain? At 
Rheims? 

Her speciality is fighting, but 
man for man she can't handle the 
Belgians or the new French, and 
her superiority to the Russians is 
dubious, while as for the English, 
they are but a handful so far in 
this war, but it has been a handful 
for Germany. 

No; get them out of their shops 
and laboratories and the current 



2i6 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK 

Germans don't seem to be of an 
egregious nobility. The Belgians 
can give them odds in it, and they 
seem to have nothing on the lately 
decadent French. They must be 
learning a wonderful lot about 
the qualities of other people, and 
perhaps they are revising their self- 
esteem. 

Arthur Withington, of New- 
buryport, who writes a letter to 
the Springfield Republican, says: 

"Efficiency and the acceptance 
of arbitrary authority by the sacri- 
fice of liberty is admitted as a 
Socialistic end. In other words, 
Socialism is in being in Germany 
to-day. The Kaiser is fighting its 
fight and German culture is Social- 
ism." 



THE GERMAN IDEAL 217 

What is there in Dr. Francke's 
exposition of the German ideal 
that conflicts with this opinion? 

Mr. Withington says further: 

"When this war is over, Social- 
ism, Prohibition, the Kaiser*s 
mailed fist. Lord Kitchener's mili- 
tary rule, and all other manifes- 
tations of the gospel of force and 
the Anti-Christian movement will 
have less blind followers than dur- 
ing the last quarter of a century. 
There will be a return to the simple 
faith of the fathers that govern- 
ment is a necessary evil.'* 

Shouldn't wonder; shouldn't 
wonder at all. And not the least 
of the wonders to come will be the 
adjustment of the German ideal 
to the change in faith. 



Deacidified using the Bookkeeper proc 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesiuni Oxide 
Treatment Date: 

MAY 

PreservationTechnolog 

A WORLD LEADER IN PAPER PRESERVA1 

111 Thomson Park Drive 
Cranberry Township, PA 16066 



